For streaming and game recording, which is more important, CPU/GPU?

[VincentVolaju]

I plan on getting an Asus GTX 780 DC2 when its finally being sold somewhere, and then later in the year I am going to do a whole new system and just transfer the card over.  I do like 90% gaming on my PC, but am looking to get into streaming and maybe even recording videos for LPs on youtube.  So I was wondering what effects the performance of both of them?

 

I am assuming when streaming, your upload speed has a lot to do with it.  However how much does the CPU and GPU effect it?

 

And for FRAPs, I am guessing its mostly based on your GPU?  Assuming a better GPU = better FPS, which means you can record at a higher FPS, I guess?  Does CPU do very much as well?

 

Any clarity on this would be great! Thanks guys!

[jamesisninja]

Streaming is mostly your internet connection, if you have a modern gaming system on the higher end of medium up to very strong you will have no hardware issues streaming, you're only limited by your upload speed. As for recording, I can record at 30 FPS for first-person shooters at 1080p on a 2500k and a 560 Ti with no stutter or anything, so you'll be fine.

[VincentVolaju]

Which program do you use for recording? Fraps?

[Godlygamer23]

CPU is usually involved in compressing the file, so it's mostly CPU bound. When bringing in your connection, the bottleneck will most likely be your connection.

[Thibaudv]

For recording and especially for streaming, get an AMD 8Core or an i7 (preferrably 6core).

 

You should try and use Dxtory for recording, it has less of an effect on your fps in games, while the quality is still great

[Glenwing]

Encoding video in real time will hit your CPU pretty hard.  Streaming/recording an FX-8350 might not be a bad idea.  Depending on what your budget is, an i7-3930K would be even better.

[Vbgf]

Which program do you use for recording? Fraps?

Wait for shadow play. Your card will support it eatherway and it's probably going to be better than Fraps.

[cafe]

msi afterburner elite.

and OBS elite

[VincentVolaju]

Wait for shadow play. Your card will support it eatherway and it's probably going to be better than Fraps.

Ive never heard of that ... is it supposed to be some new game recording software?

 

 

@Everyone else

 

Im using an i7 950 not overclocked at the moment, so like, 3.07ghz I think?  Later in the year I plan on getting an i7 4770k, do you guys think that will be good enough to record gameplay footage @ 60fps, and also be able to stream to twitch @ 60fps?  My upload is usually in the 7-10mb range.  The problem I have is whenever I turn fraps or bandicam on, it just drops my FPS in-game to around 30-40 ish, and I just cant stand playing with anything less then 60fps, the stuttering and weird input lag feeling just annoys me too much.  So I am hoping Ill be able to record and stream at 1080p w/ 60fps.  I thought maybe the gtx 780 would help a bit when I get that soon, but sounds like its all about CPU and upload speed.

[VincentVolaju]

Okay I just read about the Nvidia Shadowplay, and this thing looks flipping amazing.  Theres been SOOOO many times in MMOs where Ive been jumped or randomly get into a fight and then completely forgot to hit the record key.  So now this Shadow play actually records the last 20mins of of your current game play, 24/7.  So basically all you have to do is play the game normally like you would, and then after every fight that you want to use as a recording, just hit the "Save last 20mins" key, and then it auto saves that into a file on your comp, and starts to auto shadow record in the backround again until you hit the save key again.  You can also adjust the shadow recording from 20mins, down to like 5mins or something, assuming the things you record are only a couple mins at a time.  Dude that sounds awesome... and the best part is it has little impact on performance of computer because it shadow records from the GPU, PLUS the file sizes are in hundred's of MBs, rather then GBs.  Dude.... Fuck yes.  So glad I made this thread and found out about this thing lol.

[Godlygamer23]

No swearing.

[VincentVolaju]

Another question I had on the same topic of recording game play footage, figured Id bump this post rather then making a new one.

 

 

When I am recording game play video, is it best to record to my SSD drive, or my HHD?  Ive got a 240gb SSD that I have mostly everything installed on (OS, Steam, games, etc.), and then I have a 1tb HDD that I use to keep all my videos, music and extra stuff like that that doesnt need to be installed for the most part.  Ive heard a few people mention that recording to your SSD, your write speeds will be much faster, and the performance hit that you get while recording will be much much less, compared to if your recording on an HHD. (though im not sure if thats true or not?)

 

However I was wondering, what if I have both?  Is it best to record about 30-40gb of footage to my main SSD, then stop recording and drag/drop the files on my HHD.  Or would it be better to just set the file path I record to, straight to my HHD?  Will there be any difference?  Anyone here do any kind of youtube gaming videos, what would you suggest?

[Justjuice12]

While neither will have a direct impact on the recording/streaming process, this is limited by your internet connection, if you don't have a good framerate in the games you're playing then the quality will be terrible. In this case, the GPU is probably more important. The CPU will come into play when you're compressing the raw video files or when you render/edit. I personally use Dxtory for recording with the Lagarith Losses Codec set to YV12 mode and have multi-threading enabled as this has provided me with the best performance in games reduces the file size by up to a third of the default size while maintaining the amazing quality. I record at 30 FPS at 1080p also. For reference though, 6 hours of BF3 footage will probably be around 600~800 GB  of raw footage. This gets reduced by around 90% after compression and editing. As for streaming, the best program to use is probably Xsplit because the setup is so easy and it's super fast, however depending on your connection you can have quite a bit of latency.

 

 

Okay I just read about the Nvidia Shadowplay, and this thing looks flipping amazing.  Theres been SOOOO many times in MMOs where Ive been jumped or randomly get into a fight and then completely forgot to hit the record key.  So now this Shadow play actually records the last 20mins of of your current game play, 24/7.  So basically all you have to do is play the game normally like you would, and then after every fight that you want to use as a recording, just hit the "Save last 20mins" key, and then it auto saves that into a file on your comp, and starts to auto shadow record in the backround again until you hit the save key again.  You can also adjust the shadow recording from 20mins, down to like 5mins or something, assuming the things you record are only a couple mins at a time.  Dude that sounds awesome... and the best part is it has little impact on performance of computer because it shadow records from the GPU, PLUS the file sizes are in hundred's of MBs, rather then GBs.  Dude.... **** yes.  So glad I made this thread and found out about this thing lol.

 

 

Keep in mind with ShadowPlay, that we don't know if we'll have to play the game at the framerate that we record at like FRAPS. For example, is it possible to play at 60 FPS while recording the game at 30 FPS with this program? We also don't know how the built in H.264 encoder on the 600/700 series cards will compress the video in terms of performance while playing and also how the 20 minute recording buffer will work. What happens if you forget to press the button every 20 minutes? Does the previous game play get deleted?

 

 

Another question I had on the same topic of recording game play footage, figured Id bump this post rather then making a new one.

 

 

When I am recording game play video, is it best to record to my SSD drive, or my HHD?  Ive got a 240gb SSD that I have mostly everything installed on (OS, Steam, games, etc.), and then I have a 1tb HDD that I use to keep all my videos, music and extra stuff like that that doesnt need to be installed for the most part.  Ive heard a few people mention that recording to your SSD, your write speeds will be much faster, and the performance hit that you get while recording will be much much less, compared to if your recording on an HHD. (though im not sure if thats true or not?)

 

However I was wondering, what if I have both?  Is it best to record about 30-40gb of footage to my main SSD, then stop recording and drag/drop the files on my HHD.  Or would it be better to just set the file path I record to, straight to my HHD?  Will there be any difference?  Anyone here do any kind of youtube gaming videos, what would you suggest?

 

 

 

This is a good point, for any recording you should NOT be playing on the same drive that you record to, this can lead to some stuttering of the video and severely limits the write speed of the drive. If you have enough space to record to the SSD that's the best option, if not an HDD would be fine if it has high enough write speed. For me, I have 3 HDD's  (1x 1TB Caviar Black, 2x 2TB Caviar Black) and an SSD for my OS. I have all my games on the 1TB HDD, and then record to the other two 2TB HDD's using RawCap options in Dxtory that allows me to split the recording onto two different drives and combines the speed of both drives. To record 30 FPS at 1080p, it is recommended to use a drive (or drives) with a total write speed of 185~195 MB/s. I hope this helps.

[VincentVolaju]

Justjuice12, on 24 Jun 2013 - 6:07 PM, said:

This is a good point, for any recording you should NOT be playing on the same drive that you record to, this can lead to some stuttering of the video and severely limits the write speed of the drive. If you have enough space to record to the SSD that's the best option, if not an HDD would be fine if it has high enough write speed. For me, I have 3 HDD's (1x 1TB Caviar Black, 2x 2TB Caviar Black) and an SSD for my OS. I have all my games on the 1TB HDD, and then record to the other two 2TB HDD's using RawCap options in Dxtory that allows me to split the recording onto two different drives and combines the speed of both drives. To record 30 FPS at 1080p, it is recommended to use a drive (or drives) with a total write speed of 185~195 MB/s. I hope this helps.

So in my situation where I only have 2 drives, 1 SSD that is my main where my os and all my games are installed to, then my 1 HHD where all my videos/music are etc. If I record to the SSD, then thats recording to the drive where my game is installed/playing on. In that case, would it be better to record to my HHD? Or would recording to the SSD STILL be better even though is the drive I am playing the game on?

Also, on the Shadowplay thing, yeah I am not sure about how the ins and outs of it will be, and if itll be a better option. Im assuming though that if you dont hit the "save last 20mins" button, then yeah the footage that it auto saves probably just gets deleted. However I did read that it has a normal toggle record on/off button like all other recording software, so if youre doing a normal "lets play" recording for example, where you want to record your entire game play session then you can do that. While at the same time, if youre doing some kind of PvP recording or FPS recording etc., you have the option to wait until you get some kind of amazing kill, then just hit the "save last 5mins". Anyway, I am "hoping" thats how it is going to work, I guess well have to wait and see though.


Edit: Also one last question for you since you seem to know your stuff when it comes to this. You mentioned you record at 30fps @ 1080p, does that mean you play at 30fps as well? Or can you play a game with 60, 70, 100, 120+ FPS, and have smooth flawless gameplay, while still recording at only 30fps? When I try to record with FRAPs, say WoW for example, in game I will have anywhere from 80-150fps normally, but sometimes might dip down to 40ish depending on whats going on in-game. However as soon as I hit the record key, my FPS drops down to 30 or 40, usually whatever I have it set as the "recording fps", and then trying to play the game with only 30 or 40 fps while recording, can be reallllly annoying because I can def. notice or at least "feel" the difference in playing a game under 60fps, which is why I dont want to play anything less then that. I was under the assumption that when you set your "recording fps", that your in-game FPS drops down to whatever youre recording at. So when I read that you record at 30fps, while playing BF3, that just sounds like an extremely laggy game play experience... unless youre able to play at higher DPS then what you are actually recording at? TLDR Can you play in-game at a higher fps (60+) then what your currently recording at (30fps)?
 

[Samdb]

Well if you're recording I suppose you'll be editing, so the CPU, preferably hyper threaded.

[Justjuice12]

So in my situation where I only have 2 drives, 1 SSD that is my main where my os and all my games are installed to, then my 1 HHD where all my videos/music are etc. If I record to the SSD, then thats recording to the drive where my game is installed/playing on. In that case, would it be better to record to my HHD? Or would recording to the SSD STILL be better even though is the drive I am playing the game on?

Also, on the Shadowplay thing, yeah I am not sure about how the ins and outs of it will be, and if itll be a better option. Im assuming though that if you dont hit the "save last 20mins" button, then yeah the footage that it auto saves probably just gets deleted. However I did read that it has a normal toggle record on/off button like all other recording software, so if youre doing a normal "lets play" recording for example, where you want to record your entire game play session then you can do that. While at the same time, if youre doing some kind of PvP recording or FPS recording etc., you have the option to wait until you get some kind of amazing kill, then just hit the "save last 5mins". Anyway, I am "hoping" thats how it is going to work, I guess well have to wait and see though.

Edit: Also one last question for you since you seem to know your stuff when it comes to this. You mentioned you record at 30fps @ 1080p, does that mean you play at 30fps as well? Or can you play a game with 60, 70, 100, 120+ FPS, and have smooth flawless gameplay, while still recording at only 30fps? When I try to record with FRAPs, say WoW for example, in game I will have anywhere from 80-150fps normally, but sometimes might dip down to 40ish depending on whats going on in-game. However as soon as I hit the record key, my FPS drops down to 30 or 40, usually whatever I have it set as the "recording fps", and then trying to play the game with only 30 or 40 fps while recording, can be reallllly annoying because I can def. notice or at least "feel" the difference in playing a game under 60fps, which is why I dont want to play anything less then that. I was under the assumption that when you set your "recording fps", that your in-game FPS drops down to whatever youre recording at. So when I read that you record at 30fps, while playing BF3, that just sounds like an extremely laggy game play experience... unless youre able to play at higher DPS then what you are actually recording at? TLDR Can you play in-game at a higher fps (60+) then what your currently recording at (30fps)?

 

 

Okay, since you're playing on your SSD what you could do is use Dxtory's RawCap system to break the files up onto two different drives, that should alleviate some of the stress that your SSD will have when recording. Once you're done playing your game you can just move the .rawcap files to your HDD and then convert them to .AVI files for editing or compression, this is what I do and it's really nice. If you don't have much space left on the SSD, it might be better to just record only to the HDD though.

 

As for the ShadowPlay thing, I hope this is how it works, it would be nice to be able to automatically save the last 20 minutes of play, maybe someone can try and code a script for it to do this. I could try but I don't know any of the pointers or hooks in the program and it would be a pain to try.

 

Finally, one of the best things about Dxtory is that you can be playing at 60~120 FPS in game, while recording your video at 30 FPS at whatever resolution you want. Another feature allows you to have multiple audio streams to your game, so you can run Skype/TeamSpeak and your game audio on different channels and edit them separately. In my opinion, it's really one of the best pieces of recording software available, but one small negative is that you can only record applications that use DirectX or OpenGL/OpenCL I think. I know for a fact that you can't record in Chrome or on the Desktop. I also agree that FRAPS can be annoying sometimes because you need to record at the framerate you play at. I have a 120 Hz monitor and I can feel the difference in every game when I'm at 30, 60 and 120 FPS. You may not see the difference, but you can feel a huge difference in responsiveness. If decide to use Dxtory, and want help with an ideal setup, feel free to ask! :)