Fraps vs NVIDIA's ShadowPlay
Fraps vs NVIDIA's ShadowPlay
I've been using Fraps for more than five years to capture gameplay. I've experimented with several recording tools before, but ShadowPlay has really caught my attention. Their setup uses a dedicated hardware H.264 encoder at 50 Mbps, which should keep in-game performance stable. While Fraps works well, it lacks a quality control setting and tends to use higher bitrates (around 300-400 Mbps), leading to storage challenges. For long-term users who've played for over three hours, ShadowPlay seems to perform reliably based on the specs they provide.
I’m new to Shadow Play, but my experience with recording is pretty bad. I own several SSDs—256GB for the operating system and programs, 128GB for less-used apps, a 1TB WD Black drive, plus an i7 2600K CPU, 16GB RAM, and an HD7970. Despite this setup, recording with Fraps drops my frame rate significantly, making it very choppy and almost unplayable unless I record at half resolution. The codec also struggles on 64-bit systems, causing noticeable quality loss during editing, no matter the format. In comparison, Dxtory performs much better if set up properly, preserving picture quality close to the original. According to what others say about Shadow Play, its effect on performance is minimal and it works well with any supported GPU, especially free with an Nvidia card.
Is your system running Windows 8.1 or 7? This will affect how the recording works in manual mode and how much of the saved footage remains with Shadow mode. I've been testing it for a couple of days now, and everything seems to be working well. There are a few small glitches in the recording, but they don’t noticeably affect performance. It looks like improvements will be made to the length restrictions for Windows 7 soon.
I misunderstood your comment. However, both settings depend on the operating system. In Windows 7, manual mode halts when it hits a file size threshold, requiring a manual restart. I think the cap is around 4GB. Windows 8 doesn’t enforce this limit and can store files indefinitely based on available space. In practice, the restriction isn’t inherent to Windows 7 itself; it likely stems from poor design or using an unusual H.264 codec. DOUBLE EDIT: The size cap applies specifically to Windows 7. See below. It’s possible Nvidia could save multiple seamless files up to that limit, but the way Shadowplay formats files differs from tools like Handbrake, which is why the restriction exists.