JK-Darkside

JKDarkside

@JK-Darkside

bleach fan here for life send help

Big nerd who likes weird games and anime, writes for Hardcore Gaming 101

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JK-Darkside
@JK-Darkside

Game Screenshot Taker Programs? Need to know some!

Hey, game critic here! I tend to play games on PC or emulate, and a problem I tend to have is getting screenshots of games, a necessity for a lot of pieces I do, both personal and on Hardcore Gaming 101. I've come across some that don't work with the steam overlay, eve if they're games I'm playing on steam itself, and I've had to resort to awkward solutions like the awful xbox game bar thing.

I've been looking for something to replace the now abandoned FRAPS, but search engines are useless so I figured I'd just ask here, since doing that actually introduced me to youtube downloader programs I did not know of before. So, anyone got any suggestions?

If you're curious, the games giving the biggest issues are often indie games and some older releases where trying to use windows key combos for screen captures causes cutscene skipping.

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JK-Darkside
@JK-Darkside

I use OBS for recording already but I'll look into if it will fit my screenshot needs. My worry is it may cause lag issues when running full screen games, since it's primarily for heavy duty video recording and may run harder than something like FRAPS.

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KylieNeko
@KylieNeko

I'd give it a go.

If the generic "Game Capture" source doesn't appear to work, you may need to target a specific process or disable it and switch to a "Window Capture" source instead. (Very, very rare cases may require a full Desktop capture, but this is more usually how you can stream games like Destiny that have aggressive anti-cheat)

If you're not actually recording (and, therefore, encoding) video, OBS won't be doing too much in the background. And unless it's using the CPU encoder, it doesn't really skim much off the top of the CPU when it is encoding. And unless you're on a single-CPU single-core no-hyperthreading situation, you probably have enough CPU cores to go around. My PC that I built in 2010 -- and admittedly was a bit of a beasty at the time, but it's still from 2010 and starting to chug quite a bit on new games today -- can do PS2 emulation with OBS recording just fine.

The encoders that run on the video cards get separate enclaves dedicated to that task these days, separate from the main rendering for games and such.

Another option, sort of a worst-case scenario, on Windows is that Alt+"Print Screen" puts a copy of the currently focused Windows on the clipboard; but you have to tab out and paste it into something and save it off yourself. Kinda blah if you want to take multiples in quick succession. ("Print Screen" without the Alt modifier does the entire desktop including all monitors)

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