Lol, havent tried it yet, but isnt Fraps a graphics card benchmarking utility?
Edit. OK I just tried it, only a quick test. I will be using this. It seems I can set video quality, & get nice results, still need to play around with it...
I have been using Xfire for video capture, but to do so I have to drop all my game settings to low, & reduce the screen res to 1280x720. Xfire set to record half size video. If I dont reduce my normal game settings I get massive FPS drop, making the game almost unplayable, like it's in slow motion, especially for start & 1st corner. By dropping the game settings it is ok to play
This produces big video files which I then have to run thru Windows Movie Maker, to get a senisble file size to upload to Youtube. Obviously this results in poor quality videos.
An example of which can be found (10 mins of poor video, just watch a few seconds of it to see what I mean).
I normally run the game (without video capture) with everything on high, screen res 1680x1050, Post processing off.
I just did a test with Xfire (without changing my game settings) got the slow-mo effect that I expected (massive FPS drop), & it produced a video file (.avi) of
475Mb for just 1 min 13 sec of video.
I then did the same again with this MSI Afterburner (on it's default settings inc video half size). My game settings still the same, & got a very slight FPS drop, not really noticeable, & it a produced a video file (.avi) of
63 Mb for just 1 min 02 sec of video.
With MSI Afterburner the game was perfectly playable, with Xfire it wasnt. I then uploaded the 63Mb avi to youtube without doing anything to it.
480p
Edit. The 63 Mb avi that MSI Afterburner produced was good qulaity. Youtubes proccessing obviously didnt like it. (Edit again, ok maybe it did, Youtubes proccessing again... that can now be seen at 480p)
For the record when that clip was filmed the video format MJPG compression was selected. ^^
So I have played around. I changed the video format to uncompressed & selected 100% quality. 25 fps. Still 1/2 size video.
The slight fps drop I had before, dissappeared.
This produced a big file, 5 Gb for 3 laps (which obviously I have no intention of trying to upload to Youtube, that would cost me £50 on my crappy internet
)
Anyway I then converted the vid to mp4 giving me a 12Mb file for 22 secs & uploaded that to youtube. Sacle that up & you get 36Mb file for the same amunt of time as the vid above... smaller file supposedly higher quality.
Here is the result HD 720p
Edit. For the record I also tried capturing at full size, but I couldnt, pc isnt quite good enough, it slowed it down