Impressions after using the program a couple days.

Michael S

So I wanted to record some stuff from Alien: Isolation to bug test (then realized I was stupid and there was no bug, yay), so I looked around for something free that didn't cut out every 30 seconds like Fraps. The internet said FBX was a good program, so I tried it out.

The good: It works, lets me record unlimited timeframes, lets me preview what I just recorded, and has a clip editor I haven't actually used yet.

The annoying: Getting the overlay to show up requires me to Alt-Tab back and forth between FBX and the game repeatedly, each time I return to the game.

The bad: I'm running 120 fps on the game without any recording. Fraps records at 60 fps without any issues (didn't try anything higher), other than the 30-second time limit. FBX can barely manage 30 fps, often dipping below that. At anything under 29 fps, I start to see massive lag in the game (which is fairly common in modern video games), making it hard to play, and annoying.

I'm using the hardware encoder on "high" settings at 1080p. Obviously, I could drop the recording settings way down so the game runs smoothly while recording, but then the playback will look accordingly bad. Is it normal for framerates to drop like this while using FBX?

There seems to be some correlation between a stop/start recording command sequence, and starting to get worse framerate (i.e., sub-30 fps), but it sometimes does it anyways. Also, I don't get better fps when I'm staring at the menu, so I'm thinking it's not purely an issue of computational power.

Other: Like some other people have mentioned, a hotkey to pause recording would be nice.

I like the idea of dropping markers in the middle of recording so I can mark where I saved the game, then mark where I died, to make it easy to cut the invalid portion of the run out of the final video. But I forgot to use it.

Additional notes:
Recording to a solid state drive instead of the dual, RAID 0, 7200 RPM spindle drives did not change my framerate, so the drives aren't the bottleneck.

I sent a "problem report" with the log files since I saw requests for those in other threads.

My specs, in case they're not in your log files:

I5-6600k CPU, 3.5 GHz, overclocks to 4.1 GHz while gaming.
16 GB RAM (mid-grade gaming RAM when I bought it), 2x8 GB.
Radeon R9 390 GPU with 8 GB VRAM.
Monitor is 4k@60 Hz-capable, but I'm running both Windows and the game at 1080p@120 Hz because I can't push decent framerates at 4k.
Game is running in a borderless window without any modifications (except to get rid of the intro videos by renaming the files).
Windows 8.1.
Disabled the Steam overlay because I've had conflicts between it and recording programs.

FBX Recorder

@Michael-S Can you tell us more about needing to alt-tab between FBX and the game to get the overlay to appear? You should just switch to the game, wait a few seconds, see overlay appear and then you can start recording.

About the lag: can you try the Intel hardware encoder instead of AMD and see how that goes. If you're still getting lag, can you send us a report (from the Support tab).