D3DGear Editor's Review

D3D Gear is a tool which allows you to measure the current performance of a DirectX or OpenGL subsystem. It also has several useful features, which allow you to capture a screenshot (of a 3D scene), to record 3D rendered surfaces to a movie, and to view the rendering performance data in real-time, on the screen.

It has several options which you may want to configure. You can set it to automatically start with Windows. Also, you should configure the output format of the captured screenshots and of the movies you record. Supported formats for the screenshots include BMP, JPG, PNG, and TGA, while the movies can be recorded either as uncompressed AVI files, or as WMV.

I have to say I wasn't impressed by this program. It has quite a lot of features, but some of them don't work properly. For example, the performance graph doesn't work on my computer (Windows XP SP2, DirectX 9C). I tried changing the shortcut key with no luck.

Pluses: D3D Gear has a feature called Systray Integration. This feature allows you to display your system tray icons on the screen, even on a Direct 3D or OpenGL surface. However, the scaling of the systray icons makes them look sloppy.

Drawbacks / flaws: The first drawback that I noticed about this software is that it doesn't refresh the frame rate correctly. If your 3D application doesn't refresh the area on which the frame rate is displayed, you won't be able to understand anything that's written there by D3D Gear.

In conclusion: Even though it's a bit more expensive, I would choose FRAPS instead of this program. Maybe the next version will be better.

version reviewed: 1.92