I've been trying to record some demos from HL2 with Fraps to make videos out of, however it seems now whenever I go to record with Fraps it drops my framerate from around 80-90 to a ridiculous 3 frames a second, which makes no sense whatsoever. If anyone knows what could possibly be the cause for this and knows a fix for it, it'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead.

FRAPS slows down every game, it's just the way it works (try taking 50 screenshots in a row).

Don't run FRAPS on the drive your swap file is stored helps performance some usually. There wil always be a performance hit though.

No, FRAPS is supposed to buffer to memory. You shouldn't get that much of a slowdown. Not sure what's going on there, but as added advice, I'd recommend using the HL2 demo recorder and using FRAPS on the playback. It would be nice actually, if there was a built in demo -> video converter where it rendered one frame at a time to a video file.

What I've been doing is recording demos in HL2, then playing them back and recording them with Fraps. I just recorded one yesterday and the framerate only dropped from around 90 - 45. Today I go to record and it drops from 90 - 3. I understand the game obviously slows down when Fraps is recording, but dropping down to 3 frames a second is ridiculous.