Hardware based screen capture? Is that possible?

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xenophek

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Here's my problem: no matter how low the graphical settings are for my game, FRAPS always eats the FPS. I'll be at 60 FPS with full graphics, then FRAPS lowers it to around 25. I'll be at 150+ FPS with no eye candy at all, low res, and FRAPS still brings the FPS down to around 25. So no FRAPS for me.

My question is this: does a hardware based method of screen capturing exist? For example, could I feed the video to another computer (a computer for the sole purpose of recording the video) and play the game on mine? Or would a video card upgrade/crossfire fix my FPS drop?

Hardware:
Core 2 Duo E7200, stable overclock at 3.6 GHz
ATI Radeon 4850
4 GB RAM
500 Gig 7200 rpm SATA hard drive
Gigabyte EP45 DS3L motherboard

Games in question: Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2
 
Im sure what you want to do is possible... worth it, well thats another story.

There are most certainly hardware based devices that can record and capture a video input and even compress them at the same time.

I do not know any of these devices off the top of my head, but the only ones that pop to mind are hardware based tv tuners, but even then they probably would not be able to read the type of signal you want to send it. The rest of the gear will probably either require you to downgrade your signal significantly, either to a lower resolution, or lower quality, or will probably enter the realm of professional solutions which will probably end up costing a lot more.

I am curious about your recording settings with fraps, as it may help narrow down your bottleneck... although from looking at your settings, i am going to guess that your harddrive is the bottleneck here as far as recording is concerned. I am not too familiar with fraps, but does it record uncompressed video or does it compress it on the fly to say mpeg 2 or mpeg 4? If it is compressing on the fly, well compressing takes a lot of CPU power, so that may be your bottleneck, however if it is recording uncompressed, then your hard drive may indeed be the bottleneck.

Sorry for rambling on, but I assume you are completely familiar with the fraps settings, so I assume everything is set correctly there.... however, that would still be my first suggestion (to play with the settings) if you have not done so already.
 
I don't think it compresses it on the fly. The files sure take up a lot of space, so I'm going with no. I've also tried messing with the recording settings in FRAPS. It all behaves the same.
 
Why are you using fraps when you can record demos in the game?

As to your problem, you could always remote into your gaming PC from a different computer, then use fraps on that computer.
 
Existence. said:
Why are you using fraps when you can record demos in the game?

As to your problem, you could always remote into your gaming PC from a different computer, then use fraps on that computer.
Click to expand...

1) Yes, I can record a demo, but to get it in a format that I can edit, I must use FRAPS. Same problem.

2) What?
 
You could try hooking up a second monitor and using Rivatuner to monitor the fps. I believe there's a module you can either view or enable in the hardware monitoring section. I'd check for you now but the machines I'm currently working with don't have a use for it, and my main rig lost a hard drive and is awaiting a new one.
As for the poor performance, it could be eating up cpu time. If you had that second monitor you could open taskmanager and look at what was eating cpu time while you have fraps running. It could also be something to do with your single hard drive that I'm assuming you're reading and writing at the same time.

Also to the remoting into your computer idea, WTF? It doesn't work that way. If you're using a non-server OS, then there's no way to be on the same account on the host and a client server. Even if you could you'd not get the fps of the game you'd get the fps of it displaying on the client computer. Plus remote desktop does not play well with live rendering, it can't even handle video. In order for live rendering to work you'd have to rewrite the way remote desktop refreshes the image that you see of your desktop.
So in short, NO.

But that does seem weird that you have that much of a performance drop using fraps. It shouldn't be a graphics issue cause a 4850 crushes the games that this organization plays, so it seems weird. My guess would be it has something to do with the way fraps captures the demos and either uses a lot of cpu time or kills your hard drive.

As for hardware screen capping, you could hook a video camera up pointing at your screen and hit record. Another way you could do it, though this is a crazy and probably overly convoluted way to do it, is you could get an HDTV recorder for a second pc that has either hdmi, dvi, or component video in, and hook the second output from your gaming PC to the input of the recording PC and record it that way. All you'd need to do is make sure that the second output is cloning your main screen and that method should work. But I'd imagine that there's a better, simpler way to do it that I can't come up with right now.

I hope this clears things up for people and helps you discover your problem and an acceptable solution.
 
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All of your problems can be answered with two words: Source Recorder. Check this thread for a full explanation (it's about Gmod, but it works for all source based games)http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=148196.

Then this video may also help.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4MK_XJeNqA&feature=channel_page[/ame]

I have made MANY videos with this technique and they all look better than FRAPS
 
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The actual item that you're looking for is commonly referred to as a "frame grabber". If you were to look for some of them online, you'd find that basic ones run starting around $200 dollars or so. But these are definitely not adequate for recording games really. The higher end ones that you could consider are probably well out of your price range (easily $1000+).

Really, I whole-heartedly agree with SScagnetti's recommendation of source recorder. If you're persistent with using FRAPS though, there is an often overlooked option to choose the framerate that it records at, which actually bottlenecks your framerate.
 
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