Yea putting it at minimum wasnt the best idea I guess.

I did lower it slightly though from my normal setting and now I have GPU load% always when I play wow.

I use latest version of Xvid and I run Vista.

Just installed it and it was there.

I'm starting to regularly fraps fights to learn more about the fight as well as cleaning up my ui.

Anyway, what I wind up with is a ton of space-hogging fraps movies. I'd like to implement this workflow:
1) fraps freely
2) after the raid, add all the new raw videos to a queue to compress
3) delete the raw movies
4) upload them somewhere for archiving and later review

I am tentatively trying virtualdub to encode into h.264. Anyone else have suggestions for encoding software? How about for batch encoding? Anyone use any other software or automated workflows to keep this easy to maintain? My end goal is to click one button/run one batch file to take care of steps 2-4 after I'm done with my raid.

I'm using AviDemux for h264.
Though this also works with VirtualDub, I've found the results to be unsatisfactory (picture too bright).

AviDemux has some sort of "Jobs" option, but I haven't checked this out yet. Might be worth a look.

I've started using youtube to upload and archive my videos and it seems to work nicely enough as a personal repository. I just go through later and delete off videos that don't hold any significance to me. Since I had been away from the game for most of ICC, I'm using the videos to 1) determine what UI elements to keep/get rid of and 2) learn to improve on each fight.

I came up with a series of questions that hopefully can be clarified.

This is my issue: As soon as I record, fraps drops to 17 fps. Tried it in a raid, 17 fps. Tried it while idleing with 60 fps, dropped to 17. Dropped everything to minimum and faced the floor with vertical sync off, had 385 fps, started to Fraps, 17 fps. I've been frapsing since late TBC with a smaller monitor and a complete different rig so it's safe to exclude issues like: not recording with windowed mode, not having Fraps and WoW run on the same disk and so on and so forth.

This is my rig:

CPU: i7 950 3.06ghz
GPU: Radeon HD6870
RAM: 6GB DDR3 2000mhz
MoBo: Asus Sabertooth X58
HardDrive: WD X-Raptor 10.000 RPM 150GB (fraps on it)
Storage HardDrive: WD 7.200 RPM 1TB (WoW on it)
Resolution: 1920x1080 (24')

From the average hardware knowledge I have I concluded that my HDD's writing speed was insufficient. I've tried all possible combinations between WoW + Fraps location between the 2 disks.

I also have no RAID setup as I haven't had the time to read and comprehend it lately.

I'm thinking on buying a Solid-State Drive as I'm convinced my HDD's are my system's bottleneck, the writing speed will be either 490 MB/s, 690 MB/s or 720 MB/s, I haven't decided yet.

Allow me to enumerate my questions for better reply organization:

1 - I would like to know from someone with more knowledge than me if indeed the problem seems to be my HardDrive.

2 - I was told that WoW and Fraps shouldn't share the same HDD so when Fraps is capturing the video it won't pull performance away from WoW. But what shouldn't be on the same HDD that WoW is on? The Fraps installation or the Location where I'm sending the recorded file to?

3 - I was told that if possible, I should keep my OS on a separate HDD for the same principle as above. So where should I install my OS, Fraps and WoW assuming I have the 3 disks (Storage HDD, current main HDD, SSD), partitions are an option and so are RAID Arrays. What would be the best combination to maximize my performance?

I've looked and I can't find a more suitable forum or thread(given that this one was already created) to answer such questions.

There are multiple things you can try.

Regarding your questions:
2) Your WoW hdd and the disk you're writing to shouldn't be the same.
3) With an SSD it shouldn't matter if your OS and WoW is on the same disk. They don't have any moving parts that have to work in sequence, so reading in different 'regions' of the disk doesn't pose a big problem. Just don't use your SSD for saving your FRAPS material, the lesser you write on it, the longer it will work with optimal speed (although with newer SSDs you really shouldn't see much degration anytime soon).

As for 1) you shouldn't have any problems with your system really. Make sure you have the latest version of FRAPS and that your FPS setting for recording is actually set to above 17. Your FPS in game will always be ceiled to what that setting is within FRAPS, i.e. you can have less frames if your PC can't handle everything, but never more.
You could also try to record with half size instead full to see if there's any improvement in frame rate.
Another tip is to use the task manager to set FRAPS to one dedicated core, and the rest to WoW (or another core to some other programs first, etc).

And lastly make sure that your graphic driver is up to date. And if you're using Crossfire et al., there have been reports that FRAPS isn't really working well with it.

Ah I see. Did you try to disable the unlocked FPS option?
And what is your recording FPS set to? Remember, the more you enter here, the more has to be written to the disk per second. I don't know exactly how much the FRAPS codec does compress, but an uncompressed video of 1920 x 1080 x 32bit depth x 30 fps would be 1990656000 bit/s = 237 MByte/s that would have to be written to disk.
Obviously this is hard (if not impossible) to achieve for about any drive, but even with FRAPS' compression it can stress out a disk pretty much.
You could try to measure your disk throughput (I think HDTach worked for that, but I'm not sure) to find the best drive in your setup for writing speed.


Another issue that is often overlooked is to update the chipset drivers and/or disk controllers. If they're not working correctly, your overall (hdd) performance will suffer as well.


Also you may check out tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z to monitor your CPU and GPU load and clock while frapsing. Maybe one of them is downlclocking due to heat issues (though that's a bit far fetched).

The result is the same locked or unlocked.
Fraps is set for 30 FPS so that's not the issue either. I ran a program to determine my HDD's min max and average writing speed and its not higher than 70-80 mb/s so I'm pretty sure that's as good as it will get.

I managed to find a SSD OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB with 285 MB/s reading speed and 275 MB/s writing speed for 110 euros so I've ordered 2. I plan on putting a clean install of Windows 7 and WoW on 1 disk (WoW takes between 23.5 to 25 GB after removing the Patches folder, the Update folder and any downloader or patch file you might have laying around and Windows can go from 9 GB install to a 12 GB install) and then dedicating my other SSD to Fraps. It seemed like a good deal and with the resolution I'm using, settings on max and fps recording demand I felt like the right thing to do. If by any odd chance I don't manage to get the desired FPS, I can put them in RAID0 for a stupid amount of writing speed.

Thanks for your help sp00n.

Well, 70-80 MB/s should be plenty enough with Fraps' compression, I know it is for me and I'm using a 5400 rpm hdd to record my fraps, which I do in 1920x1080 as well. Although my FPS does drop to around 14 or lower in intensive fights, not due some unidentified bug but due to sheer missing CPU power (overclocked dual core E8200).
(Of course the video footage itself is still 30 FPS, there'll just be some repeated frames to get to 30.)


Anyway, I wouldn't neccessarily except your problems to go away if you update your hdd to SSD. Your problem doesn't seem to the hdd itself if it does reach 80 MB/s.

That's EXTREMELY dark for a WoW movie... But if that's your preference...

In terms of the changes from 720p to 1080p, do you change the properties of the actual video in terms of the video size: 1920x1080?

What are the video settings in WoW in terms of resolution?

There are a bunch of tutorials out there that show you what to do to upload to YouTube in HD; I would recommend looking a bunch of them over.