Bandicam dramatic fps drop

Question

I have the following rig:

• E8400 4.1 oced-
• nvidia 8800 GTS 3gb DDR2 RAM.
• WinXP SP3 (yes it still rocks based on this rig)

I installed bandicam today.

I tried EVERY setting & preset there is to it, from the lowest to the highest. I get 8 fps during recording (game: empire at war rts). It's not the components guys, it's something else.

I tried the RGB24 which is supposed to be the same as FRAPS lossless standard recording. I expected that since it wont have to compress it ,it would give me the same fps as FPAPS... thus 30 fps.

I have 60 stable fps when not recording this game in any situation & with max video settings. The fps drop is dramatic. I was excited when I read about bandicam on how small its files are. This is my main concern.

But, how can it drop to 8 fps when the same format?

FRAPS gives you 30fps with no lag at all. I used all formats, the best I got was 12 fps. But the result was worst than FRAPS, half size recording. (OS -game - output recording folder are on separate drives) even when I set all graphics to the lowest it gave me 200 fps & then on recording it dropped again in 8 fps so it must be something else.

Note that the stress on the CPU is tops 80%. So it manages. Also the drives do not share same ATA channel. So where is the bottleneck?

The weird thing is that FRAPS that is considered to create huge fps drop generally won't make me lag at all. I guess bandicam's engine won't exploit the full ability of the rig? I also toggled the CPU affinity but no luck at all.

Answer 1

FRAPS gets its speed specifically because of the large file size. When dealing with video you have two conflicting goals, low CPU usage vs low space usage. To use less space, more compression must be applied. To apply more compression, more CPU must be consumed.

If CPU consumption gets too heavy, it impacts performance of games. Thus FRAPS goes to the other side, rather than use compression, it saves nearly totally uncompressed. This results in massive size files which hit the memory and hard disk more, but as most games tend to be more forgiving on these, it has less of an impact on frame rate as long as the memory and hard drive can keep up with the data rate coming out of FRAPS.

The fact you are trying to produce smaller files means you are running compression while the game is going. This means more CPU consumption and thus lower frame rates. If you want small files and good performance, use FRAPS and then compress down the files produced by FRAPS after recording. Since they are basically uncompressed, there shouldn't be any measurable quality loss.