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[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Alright, so I need a fast, free, screen recorder, to record my game.

So far I've tried CamStudio and Fraps, both of which lag awfully.

It would be also nice to have a screen recorder that could record audio.

Can someone help me? I need to create an attractive video for my game.

[rivon]

GLC... Though it records OpenGL games and I'm not sure about Windows compatibility...

[Ashaman73]

I've tested some(Cam, Taksi, Fraps) and fraps is the best in my opinion. When recording a game you should consider your hardware. My FPS dropped by 1/3 with fraps, whereas other tools dropped it by more than 1/2. Finally bought fraps, because I wasn't able to find anything better.

[Erifdex]

What about Bandicam? For some reason I got better results with it than Fraps.

[Sam]

Something that can help performance with most recorders but Fraps especially, is to have it store the video file on a different hard disk (or other medium) than where the game you're recording is running from.
Fraps records video with very little compression - or at least it did when I last used it. That frees up your processor for running the game, but does put a serious load on hard disk access which can slow down any game that needs to also access the disk.

Similarly you might like to fiddle with the processor affinity settings for the game and the recorder (in Windows use Task Manager's process view, right-click the process, and set affinity) so that they're running on different cores.

I personally use Bandicam and find it to be excellent. It's not free, but has a very usable demo version which may be enough for making trailers if you can crop out the watermark. It seems to be able to capture anything I throw at it, including straight recording of the desktop and games that are not OpenGL or DirectX based. Plenty of encoding options to fiddle with, and it records sound.

PixelProspector has a list of more screen recorders that you might like to try:
http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/#video-recording-and-editing

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Taksi works well, but I've realized that the issue isn't the screen recorder, the issue is the process of screen recording in general. No matter what program you use, the process of capturing Bitmaps to output to video and capturing audio will always put immense strain on a hard disk. The only thing that I can possibly do is well... find someone who will do screen recording for me, someone with a powerful gaming computer. Because the process of recording in general is pretty laggy at the moment.

I guess there is NO perfect screen recorder devoid of lag.

[Christian Knudsen]

I guess there is NO perfect screen recorder devoid of lag.

You can record user input when playing the game, then have the game play itself with this user input while outputting each frame to a bitmap. That's what I do for making gameplay videos of my own game.