Fraps (derived from Frames per second) is a

benchmarking Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are Project management triangle, quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is ...

, screen capture and screen recording utility for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

developed by Beepa. It can capture from software that uses

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

, such as

PC game A personal computer game, or abbreviated PC game, also known as a computer game, is a video game played on a personal computer (PC). The term ''PC game'' has been popularly used since the 1990s referring specifically to games on "Wintel" (Micr ...

Operation

Fraps is proprietary and commercial software, but it is free to use for frame rate display and benchmarking, and free to use with limitations for video capture (30 second time limit,

watermark A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations i ...

) and screen capture ( BMP format only). The ''frametimes'' benchmark feature (logging of individual frame render times) gained attention in 2013 on computer review sites in debate about

micro stuttering __notoc__ Micro stuttering is a quality software bug, defect that manifests as irregular delays between film frame, frames rendered by a graphics processing unit (GPU). It causes the instantaneous frame rate of the longest delay to be significantly ...

in games. On

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

, the desktop can be captured if

Windows Aero Windows Aero (a backronym for ''Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open'') is the design language introduced in the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system in 2006. The changes introduced by Windows Aero encompassed many elements of the Windo ...

is enabled.

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

game capture works, but not desktop capture as of version 3.5.99. Fraps records video at high resolution if the computer is sufficiently powerful. The maximum supported resolution is 7680×4800. Fraps uses a proprietary

codec A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

. Therefore, playing Fraps video output requires Fraps or

ffdshow ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. ...

to be installed. Compression is relatively low and the resulting file sizes are relatively large: A two-minutes-long screencast of a

full HD 1080p (1920 × 1080 progressively displayed pixels; also known as Full HD or FHD, and BT.709) is a set of HDTV high-definition video modes characterized by 1,920 pixels displayed across the screen horizontally and 1,080 pixels down the scre ...

screen (1920×1080) may take up 3.95 GiB on disk. There is an option to encode the RGB value of every pixel, but the default is to use a YUV scheme for better compression. The color space used is Rec. 709, full range.

History

Since version 3.5.0, Fraps has the ability to store the entire session in one video file. Prior to this update, all Fraps footage was split at 4GB and the split files would have to be joined at the

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target ...

stage. However, for

backwards compatibility In telecommunications and computing, backward compatibility (or backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, software, real-world product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with Input ...

and limiting damage in case of a crash, there is still an option which allows users to use the old recording method of splitting videos. Since version 3.0, Fraps supports DirectX 11 and

. Since version 3.5.0, the minimum

system requirements To be used efficiently, all computer software needs certain hardware components or other software resources to be present on a computer. These prerequisites are known as (computer) system requirements and are often used as a guideline as opposed ...

has changed. Fraps requires a CPU with

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. SSE2 instructions allow the use of ...

instructions (

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core central processing unit, CPUs for Desktop computer, desktops, laptops and entry-level Server (computing), servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 20 ...

and later) and

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

or later. Fraps has not been updated since February 26, 2013, and the trademark on Fraps expired on May 19, 2017.

Reception

In 2012, Jim Norris from pcadvisor.co.uk praised Fraps for its featureset and usability, by stating: "Video capture is similarly option-generous with hot key functions, capture rates and sound settings that are all easy to understand and set". He also criticized the lack of customer support: "Beepa's customer support seems nonexistent. Several queries via their provided web forms (...) remained unanswered, and I was never able to contact anyone from the company despite repeated attempts to do so". But this, according to Jim Norris, seems in stark contrast to "the quality of the software and the speedy pace of its development." He concluded by praising the featureset of the free version: "the free version is quite feature generous and will suit the needs of almost every user." and gave the software 3.5 out of 5 stars.

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.fraps.com 1999 software Screencasting software Windows multimedia software Windows-only shareware Discontinued software

Operation

History

Reception

See also

References

External links