Fraps

» see fraps.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first thing most people ever saw of Fraps was somebody else forgetting to switch it off. A small yellow two-digit number in the corner of a gameplay video, sitting over the sky in a shooter or over the water in an mmo, put there by a program the person recording had long since stopped noticing.

Beepa released it on 25 August 1999. The name is the front of frames per second, and the counter was the entire product at the start. It hooked into anything using DirectX or OpenGL and drew the frame rate on top of the picture, which made it a benchmarking tool for people who wanted to know whether the new graphics card had actually done anything.

Screen capture came next, and then video capture, and video is what made it famous. Fraps could record a game while the game was running, which sounds obvious now and was not obvious in 2002. The free version gave you thirty seconds with a watermark stamped across it. The paid one, priced in the thirties for its whole life, removed the limit and never charged again for an upgrade.

I never bought a license. By the years when this mattered most I had ttnet broadband at home and was on the receiving end of what other people recorded, which is the honest position to write this from. Fraps was a tool for the person at the other end of the upload and I was the audience.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

The recording worked by writing enormous uncompressed files. Fraps used its own lossless codec, so a minute of high resolution gameplay could run to several gigabytes and a long session would fill a drive. People bought a second hard disk specifically to be the Fraps disk, because the real bottleneck was write speed and you did not want the game and the capture fighting over the same platter.

It also cost you frames. All of the encoding happened on the processor, so the act of recording your frame rate lowered your frame rate, and the number in the corner told you precisely how much. That was the trade for most of a decade and everybody took it.

~ what it made possible ~

Its own front page used the word machinima and meant it. The first large wave of gameplay video on the internet went through this program, the raid clips out of World of Warcraft and then the early YouTube era of somebody talking over a game they were playing badly. Fraps was not the only capture tool available. It was the default one, cheap enough for a teenager and reliable enough that nobody went looking further.

You can date a video by the overlay. If there is a small yellow number in a corner, somebody used Fraps and left it enabled, and the file is almost certainly from before 2014.

~ the long tail ~

What ended it was free software doing the same job better. Open Broadcaster Software arrived in 2012 and cost nothing. Nvidia shipped ShadowPlay in 2013 and pushed the encoding onto the graphics card, so recording stopped costing frames at all. Fraps had no answer to either, and version 3.5.99 on 26 February 2013 is where the changelog stops.

Nothing was announced. The site did not change and the order page still opens a PayPal flow, thirteen years on. The trademark quietly lapsed in 2017 and even that did not alter anything visible. This is the shape a lot of small paid software dies in: no closure notice and no acquisition, just a version number that stops moving while the checkout stays open behind it.

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