Fraps (derived from Frames per second) is a benchmarking, screen capture, and real-time video capture utility for DirectX and OpenGL applications. It is commonly used to determine a computer's performance with a game, as well as record gaming footage. The program is very popular in the making of amateur machinima films. Fraps can take screenshots in various formats: BMP, TGA, JPEG, and PNG. However, only the BMP format is available in the freeware version. In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:

• Benchmarking Software - Show how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.
• Screen Capture Software - Take a screenshot with the press of a key! There's no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot. Your screen captures are automatically named and timestamped.
• Realtime Video Capture Software - Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favourite game? Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560x1600 with custom frame rates from 10 to 100 frames per second.


Features:

The lossless Fraps codec allows decoding of Fraps-encoded videos (using a media player capable of decoding the AVI container format) or transcoding to other video formats (with the use of the right software). The Fraps video codec manages to capture videos with minimal impact on game performance, as it has been optimized to achieve compression higher than uncompressed RGB, resulting in smaller filesizes, though the lossless format is considerably less space-efficient than more heavily compressed lossy video formats such as DivX. This is because encoding on-the-fly to a high-compression format such as DivX would have a large negative impact on game performance (as of 2007) and only a very fast hard drive could record the immense amount of data produced in using uncompressed video. The Fraps format is a compromise of the two.

* Requires DirectX 9.0c or DirectX 10
* Requires Administrator rights
* Supports all modern CPU's (Pentium 3 and above)
* Captures fastest with an NVIDIA GeForce or ATI Radeon graphics card

Works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and x64 Editions

The latest Fraps 2.9 release adds support for Vista and DirectX 10 games. With games starting to appear using DirectX 10 graphics we are happy to report that benchmarking, video capture, and screenshots are now all fully supported for these titles.

Vista also includes a rewritten audio subsystem. Fraps can take advantage of this and directly record a sound stream from the machine without requiring any support from the soundcard driver. This allows you to capture ingame audio even if you are using a USB headset or other audio device which does not normally support a "Stereo Mix" or "What U Hear" recording input.

Since the Vista Desktop Window Manager (DWM) runs through DirectX we have also added a new option to monitor the desktop under Vista. You can now take screenshots and record video from the desktop just like any other game or 3D application.

Changes in version 2.9.6:
- Fixed games such as Stalker not being detected in 2.9.5
- Fixed video capture corruption in FSX on multi monitor setups
- Fixed codec crashes in large projects
- Fixed Fraps not starting with Windows when running on battery power
- Fixed Fraps closing when switching to battery power
- Fixed OpenGL video capture not recording correct viewport in some applications
- Fixed sound sync when recording started while rendering paused

Works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and x64 Editions