Pixel-exact captures
Every colour on screen comes out exactly as displayed, verified across all 16,777,216 colours, whether Windows composites in 8-bit or in FP16.
Latest release · Free & open source
Pixel-exact screenshots,
straight from the GPU.
FrameBurst is a system tray screenshot tool for Windows built for one thing: the highest-quality capture possible. Press PrintScreen, mark it up, and a lossless PNG is on disk and in your clipboard.
- Windows 10 & 11
- NVIDIA, AMD & Intel
- No admin rights
- GPL-3.0
What you see is
exactly what you get.
Most screenshot tools copy the screen through the CPU and round colours on the way. FrameBurst takes each monitor's frame straight from the compositor on the GPU, converts it exactly, and only then hands it to the CPU to encode.
Fast
About 45 ms from hotkey to pixels in memory for three monitors. The compute shader itself takes about half a millisecond.
Works over full-screen games
The capture hotkeys take priority even when a full-screen game has the keyboard, and the game never sees the key press.
Built-in editor
Draw on the frozen screen before you pick the region. Blur permanently rewrites the pixels it covers; everything else stays pixel-perfect. Undo and redo included.
Screen colour picker
A magnifier follows the cursor with hex and RGB. Click to copy #RRGGBB, read from the same exact capture.
Lossless PNG, everywhere
Saved to Pictures\FrameBurst and copied as an image, a PNG and a file, so it pastes into chat apps, editors and File Explorer alike.
Optional HDR copy
When an HDR monitor is captured, also save a 16-bit PQ PNG with the full range. Off by default.
Keeps itself up to date, and still works without a GPU
FrameBurst checks GitHub once a day and compares the installer's SHA-256 with the one GitHub publishes before it runs. On a PC without Direct3D 11 it falls back to GDI capture so you still get your screenshot, and --selftest checks the whole pipeline on your machine.
Lives in the tray
Click the tray icon for a region after a one-second delay. Every capture mode is in its menu, and every hotkey can be changed.
Three stages, no shortcuts.
A typical run on an RX 9060 XT with three monitors (9.9 megapixels) takes about 45 ms from hotkey to pixels in RAM.
Capture
Windows Graphics Capture hands each monitor's frame over as a Direct3D 11 texture, with no GDI copies. All monitors are taken at the same moment, each on the GPU that drives it.
Process
Frames arrive in linear FP16. A compute shader encodes them to 8-bit sRGB exactly, and only the finished pixels are copied back to RAM.
Encode
A custom lossless PNG encoder filters rows adaptively in parallel and runs a multi-threaded deflate across every core.
- PrintScreen
- A region: drag, or click a window
- Ctrl+PrintScreen
- All monitors
- Shift+PrintScreen
- The monitor under the cursor
- Alt+PrintScreen
- The active window
Take the tour.
FrameBurst lives in the tray. Everything else is one Settings window with three tabs.
Your screen stays on your PC.
FrameBurst has no account, no cloud and no upload button. Screenshots go to a folder you choose and to your clipboard. The only time it goes online is to ask GitHub whether there's a new release.
- No accounts, no analytics, no uploads
- Update checks can be turned off
- Blur rewrites pixels, it doesn't just cover them
- Open source, every line readable
Checked before it installs
An update only runs after its SHA-256 checksum matches the one GitHub publishes for the release. You confirm every update first.
Plain files you can read
Settings live in %APPDATA%\FrameBurst\settings.json and a log next to it. Uninstall from Settings → Apps like any other app.
Honest about its limits
DRM-protected video comes out black, the secure desktop can't be captured, and the normal capture of an HDR monitor is SDR. The README lists them all.
Installed in a minute.
- 1
Download
FrameBurst-Setup-x.y.z.exe(82 MB) from the latest release. .NET is included. - 2
Run it
It installs for your user account, no admin rights needed. Pick all users in the first step if you prefer.
- 3
Press PrintScreen
Choose whether it starts with Windows. It then waits in the tray, next to the clock.
“Windows protected your PC”? The installer isn't signed with a paid certificate yet, so SmartScreen may warn the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway. Updates are still checked against GitHub's SHA-256 before they run.
PrintScreen opens the Snipping Tool instead? Turn off Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard → Use the Print screen key to open screen capture, or pick other hotkeys in FrameBurst's Settings.
Requires Windows 10 version 2004 or later, or Windows 11, 64-bit. A Direct3D 11 GPU is recommended; without one FrameBurst uses slower GDI capture.
Capture it exactly.
Free, open source, and fast enough that you'll forget it's running.