The easiest and most popular way to record your own video game play.–PC Pitstop.
How to Record Your Video Games-Part II
by Marc Thomas for Daves Computer Tips
It’s now easier than ever to record your gameplay and as I mentioned in Part One of this series, it’s no longer a question of churning out massive AVI files and rendering them through a codec to achieve a manageable size for uploading. We know that Fraps generates a raw AVI file and those can be around 1Gb a minute of recorded gameplay, with the main disadvantage of only being able to use Fraps’ own built in codec, FPL1. Fraps is excellent at what it does; you simply press the hotkey in-game and it records, giving you a raw AVI which you can then convert to another format to achieve a more manageable upload size. But times have changed and digital recording technology has improved dramatically.
There are of course numerous other game recording programs and I’ve recently being playing with Bandicam, Dxtory, Action!, MSI Afterburner and Raptr GVR with some mixed results. The main plus with the first three programs is that you get to choose your decoder and different containers/formats.
Probably the single most important factor though, is that the load isn’t on the CPU as much as used to be the case if you choose a decoder that feeds directly off the GPU, resulting in negligible amounts of lag and dropped framerates. You can always tell if your CPU is struggling, when the game begins to stutter (lag) and it can become unplayable.There are still arguments as to whether the CPU is more capable of producing the lag free quality required and in the end, the current evidence should speak for itself. The image above, published by Bandicam, illustrates the latest hardware acceleration codecs from the major players and the specific requirements.
