Fraps + FPS + SW:TOR = ¿Que? I'm planning to make some uber XoO PvP or Instance vids for SW:TOR, post-retail of course, but need some info on what the average minimum computer spec would need to be. I want to record using Fraps on a 1920x1080 display down to around at least a 720x480 ratio while still maintaining at least 40fps during gameplay. Most graphic detail settings should be on high to very high. I know SW:TOR hasn't been released yet, but given the amount of other data from games released right now, what would be the hardware specs for a computer that could achieve about that performance? If possible, the more cost effective the computer is by far the better.
Well from the videos I have seen there is next to no physics in SWTOR water just seems to be a texture as well no player interaction with it. Those two things usually mean pretty low requirements for maxed settings. I'm going to say if you got 8g of ram and a +$200 card your probably good. Really I would build for something like Battlefield 3 at the settings you want and what you want to do then you will be all set for SWTOR.
What Moneda posted are minimum specs though, so thats what is required to play on lowest settings. For recommended if you want to record with fraps @ 40fps on 1080p you would probably need a 3GHz+ quad, 4-8GB of decent speed RAM, and a GTX280 (or higher) or an AMD HD4890 (or higher). Additionally you will want to have 2 hard drives that are fairly new, or at least not more than 5 years old. One drive to run the OS and fraps on, and the other to run the game on. I dont know a ton about fraps so maybe someone can correct me, but I think fraps actually uses the GPU while recording. It can only record directX games so this is what leads me to believe that. That means in addition to having a GPU that can run the game on max settings like you want, it has to have enough left in it to run fraps at 40fps. You will need a good enough processor for this too because we have proven here on these forums that a modern GPU needs a fast quad core to perform to its best ability. And you want multiple hard drives because you dont want your game doing stuff with a drive that is also being continually written to with a video file from fraps, the speed would be too slow. But then again, someone who knows more about fraps may be able to say whether or not it uses the CPU or GPU for recording? If its a CPU then a 3GHz+ quad would probably still be fine, you just wouldn't need quite as big of a graphics card. Although those cards are really not that high end anymore as it is and Im sure you could find the equivalent for pretty cheap.
With a 3GHz Quad Core and 6GB of RAM I recorded videos for TERA @ 1080p without any issues on one HDD with FRAPS. To be honest I couldn't tell you whether it used the CPU or GPU for recording, but my video card is a 480 GTX with 1.5 GB of RAM.
recording with fraps you drop 10 - 25 FPS easy when I was doing eve videos i would go from 70 down to 10 in some bigger battles!!!
Thanks Moneda. The CPU and GPU usage for TERA and SW:TOR should be comparable for the most part. What kind of FPS were you getting? That was mostly the problem I had when running Fraps in WoW PvP. Of course, I had a much slower computer at the time and WoW's graphics at launch were actually fairly demanding for the level of technology then. Computers 7 years ago... lol.
TERA's much more demanding on resources IMO. FPS... TERA: 20-50 TOR: 40-70 I never recorded video with FRAPS while running TOR though.