Upgrade for improved Fraps performance starts to look expensive :-)

[Andrew_McP]

I've been inching towards an upgrade, planning on a highly overclockable San Diego 3700 in a cheap AGP/PCI-E motherboard to make use of my great AGP vid card. But it's Fraps recording where my PC struggles most, and so I asked the creator, Rod Maher whether dual core would *really* make a big difference.

 

Aparently it does. And he added something which means life might get even more expensive.

 

> You'll definitely see a big improvement with a DualCore/Hyperthreading

> CPU as Fraps is able to do the encoding on one processor while the

> game runs on the other. Most modern 7200rpm hard drives are capable

> of capturing hi-def video (1280x720) without too much trouble so this

> isn't often a bottleneck. The biggest speed gains come from

> PCI-Express and DualCore/HT CPUs with Fraps.

 

I've been unimpressed by PCI-E cards so far. A lot of promise for the future, but no significant benefits right now over AGP. However the extra bandwidth can by utilised by Fraps because it's ripping data off the video memory very quickly indeed to record on the fly.

 

So... so I'm sort of resigned to "having" to buy a dual core processor instead, and they don't overclock so well (not that I want to try too hard with such an expensive CPU!) It boils down to do I want the best possible frame rate in LOMAC (fast single core) or best possible performance with Fraps?

 

Ah, spending money is so complicated. Maybe I should just buy Vegas instead and work with the painfully slow, but very capable avi-maker? :-) Of course if I bought Vegas then I'd have even more reason to get a dual core processor!

 

Mmm... maybe I should just get a PS2 instead and forget this stupid, complicated hobby. Either that or win the lottery... which might be tricky, because I've never bought a ticket in my life. We call it "the stupid tax" round here, because the odds are 14,000,000 to 1 in the UK lottery, which is a pretty stupid bet! I'd get better odds betting on a flyable Harrier in LOMAC. ;-)

 

Andrew McP