Bandicam

Popular programs in Various Utilities

What is Bandicam

Bandicam is an easy-to-use, high-performance, screen- and video-capturing program. Video gamers who want to record game-play footage without slowing down their games will appreciate the program's low CPU utilization, as well as its other game-related features. Those looking to record desktop activity for presentations, tutorials and other purposes will likewise enjoy the software because of its simple interface and flexibility.

With gameplay videos routinely garnering millions of views on YouTube and other sites, more and more gamers are becoming interested in capturing and uploading their own gaming sessions. Bandicam is a great fit for these purposes because it checks just about all of the boxes that gamers could propose when it comes to software of this sort.

The software is designed from the onset for low CPU and IO utilization. Going easy on these resources means that Bandicam will not be unnecessarily competing with resource-intensive video games, so game performance remains high even while the software is recording. Users can also tune the program's settings to further increase performance when necessary, trading off between capturing and compression quality on the one hand, and resource utilization on the other.

The program is capable of capturing games which use either OpenGL or DirectX for rendering, the two of these APIs being by far the most popular when it comes to displaying 3D graphics. Bandicam also includes the ability to show a program's current frame-rate on screen, so that gamers can more easily tell when their computers are getting bogged down and could use some relief. It can even limit frame-rates for games to arbitrary levels, so that, for example, older games won't unnecessarily run at hundreds of mostly redundant frames per second.

Even those who aren't interested in gaming will often find the program useful. Bandicam can capture normal desktop activity, too, so that it can be used to furnish video of this for use in presentations, tutorials, and other productions. Whichever purposes the program is used for, it offers up a number of settings that can be tuned to fit any of them. For example, users can choose from among a great number of compression methods and quality levels for the resulting audio and video, and can enable hardware acceleration options that can reduce CPU loads even further.

Bandicam even offers the ability to quickly and efficiently take screenshots of whatever is happening on screen, regardless of the program that might have focus at the time. Both free and paid versions are available, and each is worth checking out.

Pros:

• Great performance makes it ideal for capturing game footage.
• More options and flexibility than most alternatives

Cons:

• Free version comes with 10-minute recording limit and imparts a watermark.