Download FRAPS 1.6

Anonymous: 25643 announced that a new version of FRAPS has been released. FRAPS is a framerate counter that shows your FPS in a corner of your screen. FRAPS is 42KB, so it’s definitely worth downloading. A brief explanation and release notes:

Fraps is a tool that lets you monitor current framerates in a corner of the screen. It also allows you to easily take screenshots of games, and manually determine the average framerate between two points.

You may also have noticed this site is looking a lot brighter than it used to. Since the last version of Fraps, bleem! has closed its doors. It was a great place to work, we had a lot of fun, and so I’ve put together a little tribute and made sure to use the bleem colors of yellow, red, and blue!

What’s new in 1.6?

Well, a lot of people have been asking for OpenGL support and I finally got around to adding it in. I also recently dumped my Voodoo card and picked up a Kyro2, so I could actually check the 32-bit routines (and fix all the bugs!). This version has been in beta testing for a long time, and I’m not aware of any issues with it. Thanks to all the people who helped test it to its current state!

In other news, a few people also asked if I had any idea why OpenGL was so slow under WindowsXP. The smart people realized that OpenGL was not running, but instead everything was running through a Direct3D wrapper. It seems that the operating system is forcing certain titles to run through Direct3D under the guise of Application Compatibilty, even when native support for OpenGL is available. As you can imagine the performance is terrible compared to what you normally get (about half speed for me).

This version of Fraps patches the the D3D wrapper to ensure it is disabled, and everything runs through OpenGL as it should. I have noticed no glitches when running with pure OpenGL (in other words there’s nothing to suggest the D3D wrapper is warranted or required). You just get a nice speed increase up to the levels you’d expect with 95/98/2K.