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Anything like FRAPS for Mac?

Dirtyharry50

Dirtyharry50

macrumors 68000
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May 17, 2012
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It would be very cool if there was something similar to FRAPS that works well on the Mac for capturing gameplay videos as well as reporting FPS.

It would not be the end of the world to get these features in two apps either, one for the FPS counter and one for the screen capture if I need to and even can.

What do Mac gamers use for screen video capture and FPS counting in games?

Yeah, I am such a noob! ha ha!

Thanks for any help.
 
Dirtyharry50 said:
What do Mac gamers use for screen video capture and FPS counting in games?
Click to expand...

I'd wager half play 50%+ of their games in Windows and then the rest either have games that have commands to show FPS or can't.

The only thing for OS X I'm aware of is Snapz Pro X and that only has a free trial but then is a paid option. It can record either a designated section your everything on your screen.
 
i don't know of any that shows FPS built in.... but you can screen record with Quicktime. I just install Soundflower and set its input to soundflower and my main system output to soundflower and it is like a normal screen record with sound effects and everything.
 
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there is a developer command that shows FPS in source engine games but it usually shows other stuff too that's a little annoying
 
QT screen recording is an option but not a very effective one when it comes to gaming. Most of the times, there's no need for the captured video to be at the same resolution as the actual game. Even more, trying to capture on the iMac's native resolution when playing a game hits the performance so bad ( due to the huge hd i/o ) that you actually cannot play in most cases.

A gaming screen capturing s/w should be able to capture video on a different resolution than the one that is active during capturing. IIRC fraps offers the option to capture the video on half the resolution, while the Mac's WoW client can capture video in any desired resolution no matter the actual resolution that WoW runs (funny enough, Windows WoW client does not have capturing at all).

I'd love to read any suggestions here about such s/w.
 
I think I am going to go with Screenflow. That looks like a real nice app with some cool editing features as well. User comments about it seem to be very positive on the App Store too.

As for FPS counting, I'll just have to go with games that offer it for my informal testing which was all I really wanted it for. It would be ideal to have one available all the time but the fact some games have it built in will be good enough.

And there is always FRAPS when I am using bootcamp to run Windows 7. So that works there.

What will be interesting to try out is running FRAPS in a Parallels Windows XP virtual machine. I don't think I would bother recording anything there but the FPS counter would be interesting to check out in that environment. I tested that out very recently and was impressed with how well it ran some of my older Windows games.
 
malman89 said:
I'd wager half play 50%+ of their games in Windows and then the rest either have games that have commands to show FPS or can't.

The only thing for OS X I'm aware of is Snapz Pro X and that only has a free trial but then is a paid option. It can record either a designated section your everything on your screen.
Click to expand...

I have found that Fraps (on my Windows games) is better for screenshots than using Steam's built in capability although I'm not sure exactly if it is actually Steam or the Game itself, in this case Skyrim, that is enabling the screens. Instead of having the ss buried in the Steam folder, with Fraps I find the ss folder more assessable.
 
Dirtyharry50 said:
I think I am going to go with Screenflow. That looks like a real nice app with some cool editing features as well. User comments about it seem to be very positive on the App Store too.

As for FPS counting, I'll just have to go with games that offer it for my informal testing which was all I really wanted it for. It would be ideal to have one available all the time but the fact some games have it built in will be good enough.

And there is always FRAPS when I am using bootcamp to run Windows 7. So that works there.

What will be interesting to try out is running FRAPS in a Parallels Windows XP virtual machine. I don't think I would bother recording anything there but the FPS counter would be interesting to check out in that environment. I tested that out very recently and was impressed with how well it ran some of my older Windows games.
Click to expand...


I've used Screenflow while playing COD4 on my Mac, and while it worked pretty well, there was some minor choppiness. And that was on a lower than native resolution (I forget what it was exactly). It was pretty minor and I eventually it became less noticable.

I haven't tested it on the more graphically-intensive games like Portal 2 yet. Portal 2 already makes my MacBook Pro pretty hot, I can only imagine what'll happen if I throw Screenflow at it as well.
 
FPS Counter

Well, there is a kind of native Apple FPS counter for OS X.

Getting it is a little long winded though. The FPS counter is part of Xcode.

It brings up a little accelerometer-style thing for the screen FPS. Although, you don't seem to be able to pick a certain application to monitor (I may just not be using it right).

In I can't actually remember how to get it now, nor can I seem to find it on my MBP. But I do remember that you have to download Xcode, then download some additional tools from the Apple Xcode site (you'll need to log in with your Apple ID).

I'm going to Google it again, find out how to do it, then edit this post with the instructions. But I thought that I would put this up now, so you could have a look for yourselves if you don't want to wait around...

--

Okay, so what you actually need to do is get the Quartz Debug tools (this does suggest though, that it might only show FPS for Quartz powered graphics...).

You need to download the Xcode Graphics tools from Apple's website. Then run the Quartz Debug app, and you get this:

644987654.jpg
 
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What games are you wanting to show FPS in? Most of the time you can enable something via Console or a keyboard shortcut to show FPS. All of the Call of Duty titles have this, World of WarCraft and Diablo have this, etc.
 
Dirtyharry50 said:
It would be very cool if there was something similar to FRAPS that works well on the Mac for capturing gameplay videos as well as reporting FPS.

It would not be the end of the world to get these features in two apps either, one for the FPS counter and one for the screen capture if I need to and even can.

What do Mac gamers use for screen video capture and FPS counting in games?

Yeah, I am such a noob! ha ha!

Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...

There is quicktime player and imovie which I use
 
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First of all: Holy Necro, Batman!

Secondly:
TheGreatWumpus said:
Steam Beta has a built-in FPS counter for everything. I realize not every living soul uses Steam, but most do, so there you go.
Click to expand...
It's not only the Steam beta. This has become a standard feature of the Steam overlay quite a while ago.
 
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