Hi Gary,
My solution to this problem was:
H264 Pro-Recorder +
GFX Card (NVidia) with HDMI out (nb. DVI>HDMI was v.problematic) +
MX Light
This allows me to record the output of the GFX card at 1920x1080p @ 60Hz on the same machine with a CPU overhead of about 2-4%. The H264 Pro-Recorder records at upto 30Mbps h264/aac, which although compressed is enough for my purposes (tutorial videos).
In fact, I wrote MX Light initially to solve just this problem.
MX Light is currently windows only, so for recording linux/mac desktop output you would need to run MX Light in a VM or use a second machine. nb. You dont need a powerful machine to record with, as the encoding is done in hardware & the data rate is low enough for normal/cheap hard drives.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Rich