I'm going to try to answer Dopefish's and GeneralAdmission's responses in this post, so bear with me.
Fraps will cap the FPS to whatever you choose to record at. If you choose to record at 30fps, it will cap it to 30. The same goes for any other FPS you choose.
This I, and I'm sure most Fraps users are well aware of. I have owned it and been using it for some time.
Fraps does this by hooking the game, forcing it's own vblank, and pulling from the frame buffer. This is the only way to guarantee you will not have frame-tearing.
Here you give the same example of the tradeoffs as before, which I maintain, can be delt with in game or may not even be a problem, depending whether the game has tear issues or not.
As for the games that don't exhibit frame tearing, then it's still a good idea to capture at a specific frame rate so every frame is consistent. If you are playing a game that varies in frame rates between different scenes, then taking a shot every so often is just going to make un-smooth captures because there is no consistency. In many games, a lot of animations, physics, and other things are tied to a different framerate than what's being displayed. In most games, animations of players, weapons, etc. are all 30 fps, whether you are getting 120 fps in the game or not. Capturing a frame here and a frame there will just cause things to look out of place because it's unlocked and not entirely in sync.
Here you give a better example IMO, and in my PlayClaw/Fraps shootout using identical FPS, gameplay segment (of Burnout Paradise), in game TOD setting and duration, I did notice something other than just hitching that must no doubt be due to this. Many times whilst striking a small street sign pole using PlayClaw, the playback video would skip, possibly due to the physics frame rate you were referring to.
Yes, Fraps imposing its own vblank can hurt performance and input response, but it's for a good cause. If you're serious about quality, then the best thing to do is record a demo, play back the demo and record that.
Yeah, I always use a game's demo record and/or replay feature if I can, but that is more often the exception than the norm. I used to think that the apps that allow higher gameplay FPS would be MORE beneficial than Fraps in games that I can barely record with Fraps, but now, realistically, I think they're only beneficial in games I CAN'T record with Fraps. Burnout Paradise plays at pretty good FPS even on my aging P4, X1950 rig. If I'd chosen a game that is too hard to play while recording with Fraps, the test would have been more in favor of PlayClaw no doubt. So I WILL keep the app just for those instances.
Choices are a good thing, I'll agree with you on that. It would be nice to have that option. However, I think it might also be misleading. People will disable it because they get better frames, and then we'll end up with even worse videos online.
It's not misleading if you keep the above what I just said in mind. It comes in handy for games that Fraps simply gives you too low FPS to play well while capturing.
You have to keep in mind that lag in Fraps isn't always necessarily due to capturing and/or what's going on on the screen. It's consistently writing massive amounts of data to the drives. If there's a hiccup anywhere in the writing, you're going to feel it in game. Always make sure you record to a different drive entirely (one that has nothing being read or written to/from) and that it is completely defragged before you begin.
I was merely saying for the particular game I was using to compare apps with, there aren't many places in the game where even Fraps becomes noticeably laggy in use. And I know full well about capture/compression prep. I have been making vids for a fair time now. I religiously keep my drives defragged, background progs and non essential services shut down via AlacrityPC, and capturing to the secondary drive.
This has to do with what I said about and everything being in sync/consistent. If the app hooked the game and set its own vblank, this wouldn't happen. When it's just capturing the screen on its own, there's a lot of possibility for inconsistencies. This includes duplicate frames, missing frames, missing segments, audio/video sync issues, etc.
Again, a much better example than tearing. I'm sure this is what I'm referring to as skipping, hitching, etc, upon the PlayClaw clips being viewed. In fact I am now thinking that besides skipping less frames, Fraps use of vBlank may actually be the reason the captured clips are about half the size of the PlayClaw clips. And why am I the only one mentioning that? Surely those of you whom have compared it to Fraps have noticed the size difference.
There is talk, myth or not perhaps, of VSync cutting your frame rate in half. If that is true, perhaps it only happens in cases where the hardware is struggling to render at the chosen settings. If this is what is going on concerning capture, maybe that is why I am getting PlayClaw captures at about twice the size of the Fraps ones. Either way, I do not like the huge file sizes. Even on games that I get too low FPS to play well while capturing with Fraps, I tend to think using PlayClaw, were it a viable alternative in that instance, would get old having to reserve such HDD space.
@GeneralAdmission
PicVideo's MJPEG codec is known widely as one of the fastest compressors around. Towards the bottom of my guide you can see encoding test results where it spanks every other codec handsomely. If the Fraps compressor wasn't locked to the application I would have tested it as well, though I expect it would perform just as good or perhaps better than MJPEG
Thanks for the heads up on the codec, but given what Dopefish enlightened me to coupled with my tests verifying it, I can't say I'm a big fan of uncapped codecs right now. Still though, I'll give the one you mentioned a try eventually.
The main thing on image quality of the 3 clips I first viewed are the BF 2 and TF 2 ones had less texture detail, though the one with good detail, HL 2, was hitchy. It appeared to me that it was more due to the kind of skipped frames hitching Dopefish referred to, not your mouse hand.
The L4D clip was very nice though, much better overall. Perhaps it has to do with it being much smaller res. I did watch it in KMPlayer though, whereas I watched the others in WMP. That game is awesome, and though the res was smaller on that clip, it fit the mood perfectly with KMPlayer's jet black backdrop.
I have come to the conclusion so far that apps that don't cap FPS, while being smooth in gameplay, often struggle at the capture end with too many skipped frames, identical frames, and physics anomalies.
Thus I am feeling that you really need robust enough hardware to be able to capture with Fraps at a good 40 FPS at your desired settings to get consistently smooth results, unless the game is very playable at 30 or 35 FPS.
Thanks for the responses guys. I'm about to finish uploading those Fraps/PlayClaw test result clips, as well as a solo PlayClaw clip demonstrating an ultra low FPS setting (20) for those whom really need to get every frame for gameplay they can.