Fraps – Know how much FPS your computer is able to render

Today I am writing about a cool software that is used to benchmark FPS in games. Being rhyming with frags, its name is Fraps. It can display current frames per second (FPS) on your screen and save detailed benchmark statistics in a file that you can peek in to see max FPS, min FPS and and average FPS. Apart from benchmarking stuff, you can use Fraps to capture screenshots and for recording videos too.

Measuring FPS

• Run Fraps and minimize it.
• Run the game you want and FPS will be displayed near the screen corner.

Capturing Screenshots

You can use the specified shortcut to take a screenshot or even set it to take screenshots after a specified interval of time.
Unregistered version saves the screenshot only in BMP format (uncompressed).
Almost every game offers a option for capturing screenshots but with the help of Fraps you can capture screenshots of any full screen application like Window Media Player Screen (Visualization or Movies). You must be knowing that taking screenshot of videos played in media players by the “Print Screen” method doesn’t work. Fraps is the way to go, capture exactly what is being rendered on the monitor.

Recording Videos

You can use the specified shortcut for recording video. You have the option of recording the video either at half size or full size and the fps of the recorded video. Unregistered version records the video in uncompressed format and that too for just 30 seconds. A 30second video recorded by Fraps takes up about 230MB of space.

To control the audio of the video recorded, lower the system audio volume else the sound recorded will be too loud for pleasant listening.

Performance Effect

Using Fraps other than video recording purposes have a minimal impact on the performance but when it is used to record video, its performance is degraded to a much level.

Moreover the help file has detailed information on what each setting do. Do have a look at it if you want to know more about Fraps. And since I am a proud owner of ATI HD 4850 graphics card, I love playing with FRAPS + games combination. Have you used Fraps before? Do you know of any other similar software used for benchmarking purposes than do share with us in the comments.