nipsen: Yeah, Afterburner is a good (and free, if you love MSI) app (once you turn off all the glary bling :p) . Better feedback when pics are taken, and if repeats are on and so on. Mapping is easy to pull to a gamepad, etc. All kinds of good options that would have made fraps really good. Basically an overclocking/underclocking tool with screencap and video-caps. If you just need a screencap, it's great.
Somehow still use fraps, because I paid for it I guess. And it doesn't do anything with the actual captured pic, or wrap it downwards to a compressed format, and so on - it's what you had on the screen, and that's it.
But there are many other good alternatives to fraps now, that for example don't hog the main framebuffer, or cause unfortunate lockups during captures, use indirect buffers properly, have lossless recording with fast compression (so you don't need to fill your hard-drive with film - that then takes a year to load in the editor, etc), direct coding to a known format to a slightly more current era of computer telecomunicator-devices than fraps, offer in-screen overlays, choice in apis, direct streaming to youtoob and twitch, blabla, etc. Just do some searches, there are many good ones out there. Even if most are crap in different kinds of ways, I guess.
If you're recording video, shadowplay with cuda-written capture-modes and encode, and very proprietary to Nvidia, mostly wins over any other alternative generally if you want high quality capture with minimum performance impact. Since other apps need to make use of other and less efficient methods. In the sense that they all need to capture the framebuffer content and copy it to disk (somewhat fast, but can be problematic). Or use some other pipeline via directx or some other api to record from, which typically even in the best cases introduce some lag (and performance hits), for example because the bus is trying to stream comical amounts of data in addition to the game hogging 99% of the resources in the first place, etc.
So shadowplay wins by cheating, basically. AMD's plays.tv is supposed to be pretty good as well, using a similar approach from the driver-level to use the gpu for encoding. Also works well with nvidia cards if you have enough shader-units available(read: laptop cards are out). But it doesn't guarantee the same output as shadowplay from the entire cuda thing deliberately targeting resources on the card that are unused in general, and happily avoids all race-conditions or starvation that other types of capture will have..
There's also a mod for removing the hud, if you want to take pictures like that.
https://nomansskymods.com/mods/modnmse-nohud-toggle-hud-onoff-with-f5-full-hud-toggle/
I've managed to use an alternative to fraps (Bandicam) and that seems to work well. Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!
