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Video recording: hardware usage?

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Senx Sweden5024 Posts April 01 2010 01:31 GMT #1 Hey I'm just curious to know what a video recording software such as Fraps actually uses in your computer..is it RAM, CPU, graphics or harddrive, perhaps a combination? Reason I'm asking is because my comp setup of the following: Core 2 duo 3,16ghz 4 gig ram geforce gts 1024mb .. cannot run 3D games without small but really annoying choppiness. This make me a really sad panda, Any tips on what component needs buffing? Or if there is any software fix to help with the issue?

wanderer United States641 Posts April 01 2010 01:32 GMT #2 16ghz? holy shit man. my computer doesn't have shit on yours.

Sadistx Zimbabwe5510 Posts April 01 2010 01:37 GMT #3 Hard drive and CPU take the biggest hits. Ideally, you want to record to a separate empty hard drive, that not your system drive or the game drive. A dual core should be fine, but again, ideally for video recording/streaming at high resolutions you want a quad.

Senx Sweden5024 Posts April 01 2010 01:39 GMT #4 Well my CPU is the best component of my comp... so i guess my HD must just be really fricken bad :/ Does video recording software even take use of 4 cpus?

wanderer United States641 Posts April 01 2010 01:44 GMT #5 i just realized that you're european, and so its actually 3.16 in the American notation. my bad man

love1another United States1844 Posts April 01 2010 01:55 GMT #6 The only reason i can think that your comp can't handle is it that you're being configured to write to disk rather than ram, (which makes sense) or that your resolution is insane. Probably a combination of both. A raw recording of a 1440x 900 video at 32 bit color and 25 fps, is... well, I'll let you do the math but it's something on the order of like 100 mB/s... A typical hard drive bottlenecks somewhere between 10 and 100 mB/s. That could very easily be your bottleneck. Halving the resolution should do the trick.

T.O.P. Hong Kong4684 Posts April 01 2010 03:04 GMT #7 I never had success with video recording softwares but I noticed that it's better if you have 2 hard drives. For Example if Starcraft is on the C drive, it's better to have Fraps write to D drive. I suppose that getting a SSD would solve a lot of problems. Or if you use something like Camtasia and select a codec like x264vfw, it'll require less Hard Drive usage as long as you have enough cpu power.

love1another United States1844 Posts April 01 2010 05:03 GMT #8 SSD would solve the problem. But they're crazy expensive.

semantics 9879 Posts April 01 2010 06:47 GMT #9 Yeah you need a good ssd else you might as well get a good normal hdd becuase cheap ssd their sustained write times are not that good. throwing down 300 for video recording seems a bit ridiculous anyways. Might as well raid 2 or 3 seagate 7200.12 or the new samsung's drives together for that price. seriously i could get 3 seagates .12 750gb for like 170 still be cheaper then a good ssd although not as quiet. Well i have 2 7200.12 in raid each can do sequential writes at 135mb/s giving me an avg of 240mb/s(via crystaldiskmark) in my raid set up for only 120 bucks which can do 1920x1080 at 30fps pretty easily, the problem with using a compression to get a recording while playing games is that it zaps cpu power away from the game to the compressor which is fine if you have like a 200-300 dollar cpu that isn't fully tasked by the game anyways.

Senx Sweden5024 Posts April 01 2010 10:12 GMT #10 Gosh so much money spent just to be able to have lag-free recordings.. Im gonna go with T.O.Ps suggestion of trying out Camtasia with that particular codec.. Thx for all the replies

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