Are there ways of recording your game without using the game-playing PC's resources?

Question

In other words , without using recording software that runs on the same PC playing the game.

I've tried using FRAPS in the past, but the slight drop in frame rate and control-to-result time creates a disadvantage in the game.

I am looking for a way, other than the obvious (point a video camera at the monitor) of recording what the graphics card is outputting.

I have a separate PC if a solution could be found that requires a second PC's resources to do the recording and encoding.

I am open to answers/solutions that require the spending of money.

[Taking advice given on gaming.stackexchange.com This question is reposted from there]

Answer 1

If you main PC has TV-out and the secondary has TV-in you could play the game on the TV-out monitor (assuming the card will play the same content to the other output too, or you have a TV signal splitter to put the game on a real TV display too, so you can see what you are doing in-game) you could record that way. Unfortunately you are not going to get an HD recording this way.

If your receiving PC has a capture card capable of recording from a HDMI port you'll get better quality - you won't have this as standard, but such a capture card can can be bought. This is the only affordable one that comes up on a Google search for "hdmi capture pcie" here (the rest being an order of magnitude more costly) and that isn't particularly cheap unless you plan to use is a fair bit but you might find more available in your territory) then you could potentially get a good 1080p (or what-ever your game plays at) recording that way, assuming the game doesn't turn on the DRM measures (i.e. "don't copy me" flags) available to HDMI signal sources.

Answer 2

Forget another pc. Use this to feed to your vcr or dvd recorder. It converts your pc's vga output to s-video, composite or componet video (some of which you'll find on many late model recorders). You can split your audio out of your pc and feed it into the rca jacks of the recorder easily. Radio shack has the audio splitter for that if you need it.