There are number of commercial recorders which have various abilities but all of them can record videos from games.
Which recorder is the best of the best? 
We’ll take Fraps, PlayClaw, ZD Soft Screen Recorder,GameCam, Total Screen Recorder and test them in various conditions. As test applications will be taken Battlefield Heroesgame and sample from DirectX9 SDK AntiAlias. Game will be used to test in real conditions and AntiAlias sample will be used to check video codecs performance, because this application doesn’t load CPU and video card very high and our game recorders can show all their power. All recorders are in trial mode, audio recording is disabled.
Test computer specification: Intel Core2Duo E6550 (2.33Ghz), RAM 2Gb DDR2-800, 2 HDDs, Video GeForce 8800GT 1Gb, Windows XP Pro SP3. All tests Screen resolution will be done in full screen mode, frame size is 1440×900, 32bit color depth.
First of all, let’s make synthetic test with DirectX9 SDK sample application AntiAlias. Without any recorders this application gives 2100 FPS.
First results! GameCam limit FPS to 30 and frame size to512x320 so it is impossible to compare it with other recorders. ZD Soft Screen Recorder capture video in Windows Media format and this prevent us to determine recorded video real FPS and frame size. Leaders in video codec performance are Fraps andPlayClaw. They produce maximum frame rate (68 and 55 in low compression). But PlayClaw allow application run with higher FPS. The lowest frame size (and as result, final video clip size) was done with PlayClaw (high compression). This mode take a lot of CPU power (look at video FPS, it is two times lower than in low compression), but frame size is six times lower!
The worst recorder is Total Screen Recorder. This recorder (asGameCam) use build-in Windows video codecs and produce extremely low video FPS no matter which codec was selected. It looks like the problem is in recorder and not in video codecs. We will remove it from our recorders test list.
Ok, first test is over. Now let’s run recorders with relatively new game Battlefield Heroes.
Ingame FPS without recorders is limited to 100, tests was made in tutorial mode (without network game) in the same place without moving. Here are the results:
Well, as you can see, ZD Soft Screen Recorder give almost same results as in previous test. But now we can determine application FPS. Not bad result but it was with lags, so it is impossible to play with pleasure. GameCam doesn’t support Battlefield Heroes at all. Anyway it is impossible to understand how good or bad this recorder with trial version. Fraps is still getting first place in codec performance, PlayClaw win the contest with lowest frame size.
So, we have 2 winners. Who is better for you? It’s your decision. We didn’t test recorders with modern 3-4 cores CPU (or Core i7 with 4 cores and Hyper-Threading). But this test will be later.
Both our winners have ability to capture Vista Core audio. If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 then it is important feature for you. All other recorders haven’t this feature and sometimes (depend of your hardware configuration) they are useless if you want to capture audio with video.
PlayClaw also have useful feature for online gaming – Ventrilo and Teamspeak overlay. This feature will allow you to see speaking players’ nicknames on game screen.
PlayClaw web site: http://www.playclaw.com
Fraps web site: http://www.fraps.com
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Tags: best video recorder, Fraps, PlayClaw
[...] are the most powerful game video recorders and I want to know, which one is the best. In previous game video recorders test drive I’ve tested several recorders and generally Fraps was on the first place and PlayClaw on second. [...]