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My system build I thought was adequate enough to record most games with great ease, but I'm facing issues. I can record at 720p no problem, any game. I want to be able to record at 1080p, but when I try my system begins to bog down and gameplay becomes choppy. How can I improve this?

  • Intel Core-i5 3570K
  • PNY GeForce GTX 660
  • 8Gb G.SKILL Sniper DDR3 1600MHz
  • Recording to a Hitachi 7200RPM 1Tb 64Mb
  • Dxtory using Dxtory Video Codec, RGB format with Compress checked
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1  
I hope you're recording onto a separate hard drive than the one you're running the game off of. – Luck Feb 5 at 20:38
Yeah. Both hard drives are the same, just different brands. – DarkWolffe Feb 5 at 20:50
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Sounds like you've got a bottleneck somewhere. Either in the processing power requirements, GPU usage, or straight up HDD transfer rates. – fbueckert Feb 5 at 21:05
What program are you using to record? OBS has the best performance, from what I've heard. – Decency Feb 5 at 21:39
Check your resource monitor to see where the bottleneck is. Judging from your specs it's most likely either disk or GFX, for you disk check the queue in resource monitor. For your Graphics card you will have to use process of elimination or 3rd party tool like revo tuner (including it's various flavors). – Kyle Feb 5 at 21:52
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Turns out the problem was my hard drives after all. Bottlenecking was a major issue, despite being 7200RPM and SATA 3Gb/s which I amount to being a fairly good system.

After investigating Dxtory further, I found that using the RawCap file format allows the program to record the file over multiple hard drives, and comes with software to combine them all into a single AVI file which would then need to be rendered.

As proof, I did a Path of Exile recording test while in windowed fullscreen. 1080p was no problem at all.

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I had the same experience with a totally different setup, using a BlackMagic capture card. HDD ended up being the issue for me as well, and I ended up opting for a separate dedicated SSD. Capacity is not an issue for me, because when I capture it is never for very long durations. – EBongo Feb 6 at 3:51
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Just because the interface is capable of transferring 3Gb/s doesn't mean the device is. – kotekzot Feb 6 at 6:17
up vote 0 down vote

Yeah, it is probably the hard drive.

You can calculate the bandwidth required for raw RGB recording as follows:

Truecolor 24 bits = 3 bytes per pixel.

Size of one RGB image: Width x Height x 3 bytes. So, at 1080p:

(1920 x 1080 x 3 bytes) = 6,220,800 bytes

Recording at 30 fps: x 30 = 186,624,000 bytes per second of recording

which is / 1048576 ~ = 178 MB/s

Compression taken into account (about 50% bandwidth gain, assuming YUV 4:2:2 format) you would need at least a harddrive which can write at 90 MB / s without breaking a sweat.

Double that for 60 fps recording, which leaves you not much of an alternative other than RAID or SSD.

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Use RAID 0. This will effectively give you a better transfer rate to your HDD's overall and should reduce this issue.

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