Fraps is a benchmarking, screen capture, and real-time video capture utility for DirectX

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

 and OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

 applications. It is commonly used to determine a computer's performance with a game, as well as record gaming footage. The program is very popular in the making of amateur machinima

Machinima

Machinima is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation...

 films.

Fraps utilizes a specialized lossy codec

Codec

A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...

 designed for capturing videos with minimal impact on game performance, as it has been optimized to use much less CPU time than most other codecs while still reducing the hard-disk bandwidth

Bandwidth (computing)

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

 needed to save the video.