OCAT Review: A Worthy Replacement for FRAPS?

Last December 8, 2016, AMD released their Crimson ReLive Edition drivers which introduced many new features. Along with the new features, AMD introduced OCAT which stands for Open Capture and Analytics Tool. It’s an open-source benchmarking tool that can record the frame rate and the frame time of games using the new API’s – Vulkan and DirectX 12. OCAT is not the first benchmarking tool that is compatible with Vulkan and DirectX 12. You may probably know about PresentMon which does the same function as OCAT. However, PresentMon doesn’t have a user-friendly interface. OCAT solves that problem and we tested if it really works. The version we’re using is shown in the screenshot below.

The PC we tested on has an Intel Core i3 6100, Gigabyte GTX 970 ITX, and 8GBx2 DDR4 3200 MHz. All benchmarks were done on Windows 10 64-bit. OCAT is not yet available on Linux. Check the screenshots below for the image quality settings we used for Rise of the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and DOTA 2.

The performance summary of the version of OCAT we tested only outputs the average frame rate and the 99th percentile frame time. It also generates a detailed report on the individual frame times so we were able to show you the 95th percentile frame time and the 90th percentile frame time. However, OCAT has no report for the frame rate over time like what FRAPS do. The frame rate over time is derived from the frame time data but we are still working on a spreadsheet to do that. For now, the frame rate results are just average data.

OCAT works as intended and the version we tested is stable. The only issue it has right now is that its frame rate counter overlay flickers when running a game in DirectX 12 mode. OCAT has the potential to be a great alternative for FRAPS, with results in sync with that of the veteran benchmarking software, and we hope its features be improved over time. To those who are interested, you can download OCAT at GitHub.