How I can improve my PC for game recording?

[SamOrExilify]

Hi all,

As recently as December 2012 I finished building my current machine, here are the specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68-XP-UD3 (as I recall)
Processor: Intel i5 3570k
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB
Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 2TB
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 670 w/ 4GB's of VRAM
PSU: Corsair CX750
and a 1080p Samsung monitor

My main issue is with my performance, particularly when recording video. My most prominent recent example is with Team Fortress 2 (a nearly 6 year old game), with which, outside of recording, I can easily achieve FPS between 100-200 (Haven't got definite statistics I'm afraid). However, when trying to record with Dxtory (I find I get much better video quality than in FRAPS) I'm forced to change to 720p, Lagarith Lossless and 30fps fixed to even get video with decent quality.

It's really upsetting to find such a reasonably high powered machine struggle with being able to record well, even with games such as Minecraft with a HD Shader on, I'm still forced to do largely the same thing.

So my question is how I can improve my current machine to record MUCH better than it currently does?
This would hopefully be at 1080p, at 60fps, and I would really love to record in 'true' quality, which is basically uncompressed picture-perfect quality.

I'd assume that a SSD will be the way to go, but wondered if this would be enough, I can afford to replace components if need be.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your feedback.

 

[haynesr07]

This is what you will want to do and I noticed a huge difference for me. If you are recording from PC, you will want the games installed on SSD, and you will want the program running and recording off of the hard drive onto the hard drive. That means the drive is independently working to write the new video.

 

[David Lugarov]

An SSD will greatly improve performance, since you'll be recording you need really fast read and write times and 90k+ IOPS. Right now, the fastest SSD that you'll find is the Asus ROG SSD, it is crazy fast, but also really expensive, if you can't afford that, go for a Corsair Force GS SSD, 120GB preferably, since I found it to be super smooth and fast.

 

[David Lugarov]

You can also try MSI Afterburner to record.

 

[Traciatim]

As other people have mentioned, try alternate recording software to get better results.

Keep in mind that 1080p @ 60FPS uncompressed 24-bit video is 1920x1080x3x60 = 373248000 bytes a second, or 355MiB a second . . . you need a serious drive setup to be able to sustain that . . and piles and piles of space dedicated just to the video. 21GiB a minute to be precise, which means a 256GiB SSD would be filled in 12 minutes.

You are trying to process an immense amount of information to do 1080p60 video, even if you have to compress it on the fly before writing it. You shouldn't be surprised if a machine that's trying to run a game at the same time can't keep up.

Alternatively you could try a device like http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr2-gaming.html which does the compression and then sends it back to your PC so it doesn't impact your performance as much. I haven't used one, but it certainly sounds like an effective solution.

 

[JRC78]

adding more RAM always helps

 

[drtoast]

You could also try an i7 to give a bit more power to the recording software without impacting the game.

But above all i have to agree with the suggestion of a seperate drive for the video.

 

[Optimus_Toaster]

Firstly an overclock on your i5 to about 4.2-4.4Ghz will help hugely.

Secondly try recording to a different drive to the one you run the game off of. This will make the game much smoother to play whilst you record.

As an addition option try using the x264vfw codec for MSI afterburner, I find only a minimal drop in FPS and the recording sizes are only about 10MB/s for 1080p 30fps at a quality level that looks very similar to lossless once uploaded to youtube (where I assume you are uploading these videos too).

 

[Guest]

More ram will help you the most in your current build, SSD is not needed with that much Vram the game will load into memory (if you increase it to 16gb minimum **Windows 64bit required above 4gb if you didn't know** ) and the GPU ram and hardly touch the drive once done, A separate HDD will help with recording but you don't need a SSD for it, go a WD raptor or WD Black drive, 1 or 2tb should do it.

 

[haynesr07]

If you are recording PC games, you definitely want the SSD running the game and OS. And you will want a seperate drive running the other program being used to record and writing the new data to it.

And to the guy who said a 256gb ssd would fill in 12 minutes, why would you ever record to a ssd? rofl.

I have ran this setup for PC and Xbox for almost year and a half. Never drop a frame when streaming or when recording. Although my internal capture card is only 1080i for my XBOX. PC is straight 1080p, 30fps at all times.

 

[Traciatim]

If you are recording PC games, you definitely want the SSD running the game and OS. And you will want a seperate drive running the other program being used to record and writing the new data to it.

And to the guy who said a 256gb ssd would fill in 12 minutes, why would you ever record to a ssd? rofl.

I have ran this setup for PC and Xbox for almost year and a half. Never drop a frame when streaming or when recording. Although my internal capture card is only 1080i for my XBOX. PC is straight 1080p, 30fps at all times.

Because some fool up top suggested it so I was pointing out how idiotic the idea is if you are recording 1080p60 uncompressed video.