So I've been using FFSplit for video capture for games for a while and it's just recently hit me that it's been causing a bit of an FPS drop in-game and, on top of that, it won't record quite a few games when they're fullscreen which is a big deal for me. However, it also has nicely compressed videos that are something like 1 GB/hour whereas I've heard that FRAPS and dxtory can get up to 10 GB/min. I really don't regularly have the space for even 5 GB/min and might want to record up to an hour or two at any one time.

I'd be perfectly happy with FFSplit if it could just record any game fullscreen and I'd deal with the performance hit but as-is, it's just too much of a pain to have to consistently adjust the part of the screen it's recording and then run the game windowed and still have to deal with the FPS hit on top of that.

Anyways, despite that, I've been looking at Bandicam, Action!, dxtory and MSI Afterburner.

Bandicam seems to be about where I want it to be. Somewhere midway between quality and decently low video sizes.

I'd have tried MSI Afterburner by now but I'm a bit worried about the fact that it runs a local server and what that might mean for the impact on in-game FPS. Not to mention I've heard it's a bit of a pain to set up recording both mic and game audio at the same time but may have possibly been fixed in recent versions? Haven't found enough info to be sure. Also not sure about video sizes. Haven't found any info on that other than "significantly smaller than FRAPS/dxtory" which, at 5-10 GB/min, doesn't mean a whole lot.

The others I'm looking at but am less receptive to because of the video sizes. If it means that I have to get them for the best experience, though, then I might go for one of them.

Any input is appreciated. Definitely want to be sure that MSI Afterburner won't do what I want it to before dropping cash on any of the others.

i havent had the time to try it out, but apparently Nvidia cards can use Nvidia's Shadowplay to record videos at atleast supposedly low hit to fps.

But like i said, havent had the time to try it.

AMD. :<

I dont have a gaming computer, but i do record. I record with camtasia. I find it a nice software that gets the job done. I never get any drop frames when i use it. Sadly you will have to play the game in windowed mode. Also it comes with it own editor.

how about http://obsproject.com/

Can't seem to find much info about it. Video size/performance/compatibility seems to all be unable to be Google'd.

You will always experience performance hit if you use any software solution. Dedicated capture card or nvidia shadowplay (which is really good and fast because of built in hardware encoder) are the only options I can think of.

there is no better software to record video games than bandicam, I tried with many in the past(fraps, camstasia, camstudio, sylsoft, msi after, ,zd soft, litecamp and 1 more but I cant recall right now) and the only one that allowed me to record while playing an emulator was bandicam, just try with different codecs, for example x264 is very fast and the video compression is really good, and if you have an intel cpu that supports Quick Sync Video or amd card that supports acceleration tech you wont even notice the software running. The next step is to buy a dedicated video capture like a Hauppauge or avermedia for example.

So, seeing as Bandicam is coming closest to what I want out of video recording software (a good middle ground between quality and reasonable file sizes), I gave the trial a shot and so far I'm liking it. The games I've tested with either barely take an FPS hit or don't at all, although none of the ones tested are very intensive, as I was mostly trying to see if it was able to record them fullscreen whereas FFSplit couldn't. It doesn't hurt that the interface is simple and easy to understand.