Recording gameplay from SSD

[Aseral]

I got a new computer a few months ago mainly to be able to record while playing some games without laging. Computer Spec is i7 950,ATI 5870, 6Gb DDR3 and Windows 7 x64 and my hard drive does 7200 RPM.


The capturing software I was using at first, is called Fraps(everyone kept saying its the best). Still though, even on this new pc I kept laging in game. After doing some research I found out that its better to save the recorded footage on a seperate hard drive than the one your playing from. I needed some extra space for movies etc anyway so I decided to buy a 2TB external hard drive conected through USB 2.0. I tried saving what was being recorded directly to that hard drive but still I kept laging. After contacting with Fraps support through e-mail they said that the problem was the low data transfering speed of USB 2.0. They said it transfers 30MB/sec max while I needed around 80-90(I'm recording at 1080p).


So I started thinking about getting another external hard drive that is either conected through USB 3.0,SATA or FireWire. But then I found out about how big of an upgrade SSDs are and how fast they make applications run, so now I'm thinking of getting an SSD turning it in my main hard drive(having windows on it) and making my current-main hard drive(which gets conected with the latest SATA technology) the one I'll be saving the footage into.

The thing is I'v heard some people say that because of the way SSDs work, even though they are extremely fast, they are not suited for Frapsing. Can anyone here confirm this?

By the way I'v tried using a diferent recording program called Xfire(its mostly used for live streaming online but can be used for recording also) and it does not lag me at all, except that after I click to stop recording it kind of lags me/freezes the game to save some things(it cant be the whole footage itself, would make no sense). These 2 programs work diferently it seems and I would really like to make fraps work(since everyone say its the best) so any help would be appriciated :biggrin:

[cometbus]

I've done a little bit of messing around with Fraps, and in my experience, the bottleneck was my CPU. Depending on how CPU intensive the game you are trying to record is to begin with, trying to also capture 1080p video simultaneously is likely *extremely* CPU intensive.

Of course it is altogether possible that it was the issue of playing the game off of and writing to the same HDD, but I can't comment on that firsthand, since I've always run Fraps and whatever I'm recording all off the same drive.

What game are you attempting to record? Do you ever get any performance dips in the game during normal play, even when you aren't recording?

[Aseral]

I'm recording World of Warcraft which isnt that "heavy" and I have 60fps all the time(vertical sync enabled) and can have 100-180fps in many places with vertical sync disabled. So the performance is insane pretty much all the time. I got a friend that records wow at 1600x1050(while im recording at 1920x1080) with i7 930, way worse GPU than mine, exact same external HDD and plays from a worse HDD than mine and tells me he almost never lags while frapsing except of some spikes every now and then.

So only thing I can think of is that bit of extra resolution translated into extra size messing with USB data transfer  rate.

[Aseral]

I'm recording World of Warcraft which isnt that "heavy" and I have 60fps all the time(vertical sync enabled) and can have 100-180fps in many places with vertical sync disabled. So the performance is insane pretty much all the time. I got a friend that records wow at 1600x1050(while im recording at 1920x1080) with i7 930, way worse GPU than mine, exact same external HDD and plays from a worse HDD than mine and tells me he almost never lags while frapsing except of some spikes every now and then.

So only thing I can think of is that bit of extra resolution translated into extra size messing with USB data transfer  rate.

[cometbus]

Ah, yeah through USB 2 1080p might be a bit much, especially with the enormous amount of writing Fraps requires at that resolution(no on-the-fly encoding). If your tower has an external SATA port, the easiest, and cheapest option would probably just to record to a 7200 HDD through that. If that's not an option, USB 3 or Firewire might be the way to go, depending on which is more readily available to you. Another option, depending on how comfortable you are opening up your computer, is just to grab an internal SATA HDD, and record to that.

I really don't think a SSD is necessary for your "Fraps" drive to record smoothly, though, but I could be wrong on that, I've never seen the difference first-hand.