Fraps (derived from

frames per second A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent. Frame and FRAME may also refer to: Physical objects In building construction *Framing (con ...

) is a benchmarking, screen capture and

screen recording A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture or a screen recording, often containing audio narration. The term ''screencast'' compares with the related term ''screenshot''; whereas screenshot ...

utility for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

developed by Beepa. It can capture from software that uses DirectX and OpenGL, such as PC games.

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) 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 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, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

, the desktop can be captured if

Windows Aero Windows Aero (a backronym for ''Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open'') is a design language introduced in the Windows Vista operating system. The changes made in the Aero interface affected many elements of the Windows interface, includin ...

is enabled.

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

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 device or computer program 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 on a signal or ...

. 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 ...

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 screen vert ...

screen (1920×1080) may take up 3.95

GiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

on disk. There is an option to encode the RGB value of every pixel, but the default is to use a

YUV YUV is a color model typically used as part of a color image pipeline. It encodes a color image or video taking human perception into account, allowing reduced bandwidth for chrominance components, compared to a "direct" RGB-representation. H ...

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 huge 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 d ...

stage. However, for backwards compatibility 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 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

. Since version 3.5.0, the minimum system requirements has changed. Fraps requires a CPU with SSE2 instructions (

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 200 ...

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 upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

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

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