Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: clerick on October 27, 2011, 10:08:22 PM
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I'm thinking about using FRAPS to record my sorties since the normal film recorder doesn't record TRACKir views. I'm I going to take much of a performance hit by doing this?
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depends on your system. I have the 2500k with evga 465 card, i dont really see much of a hit. but on my older rig my fps would be 1/2. post your specs.
semp
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(my 'net is spazzing out here, tried posing this and it failed, attempt #2)
It really depends on your system, your graphics settings, and your resolution.
Generally speaking, it's a noticable hit. If you want to record full screen for any duration (and FYI I'd suggest short segments rather than entire sorties) you'll need a pretty powerful system.
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Thanks for the input. I'll hold off for now. I'm barely hanging on at 55fps at 50% eye candy with game booster shutting down most processes.
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Fraps has had a bug that caused the framerate to be locked to a low multiple of refresh rate when using vsync. This bug is now either patched or going to be patched in the next update.
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I have found surprisingly good FPS while recording with MSI afternurner. I don't know if it's specific to AMD cards or if it also works on Nvidia, but I'm running AMD right now and even in BF3 beta and a few other games on 3 monitors I didn't notice a massive hit in FPS while recording.
It was quite impressive. Another forum post clued me into this, but can't remember who gets the credit for finding it.
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I have found surprisingly good FPS while recording with MSI afternurner. I don't know if it's specific to AMD cards or if it also works on Nvidia, but I'm running AMD right now and even in BF3 beta and a few other games on 3 monitors I didn't notice a massive hit in FPS while recording.
It was quite impressive. Another forum post clued me into this, but can't remember who gets the credit for finding it.
I have an AMD 5570 it's just that I haven't upped the RAM on the MB yet. I'll look into the MSI program.
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Fraps has had a bug that caused the framerate to be locked to a low multiple of refresh rate when using vsync. This bug is now either patched or going to be patched in the next update.
According to the patch notes of the new Fraps version as of a few days ago, they fixed that finally. But I haven't tested it yet to verify myself.
I have an Intel i7-2600K and a GTX 560 Ti, and I cannot record as well as I'd like in AH. In other games it works great, but AH not so much. The thing is, turning off eyecandy or turning down Fraps settings has a very limited impact... given the tradeoffs I generally keep the settings maxed because turning things down doesn't get me much. I'm going to investigate options for storage next, i.e. SSD, as maybe that'll work better. The main problem there will be filling the SSD, but I can just transfer the files occasionally to standard hard drive for long term storage.
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You don't use an SSD for storage. You use it for performance, and store on your platter drive. FRAPS or MSI Afterburner should be set to save to your HDD, not your SSD.
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I have found surprisingly good FPS while recording with MSI afternurner. I don't know if it's specific to AMD cards or if it also works on Nvidia, but I'm running AMD right now and even in BF3 beta and a few other games on 3 monitors I didn't notice a massive hit in FPS while recording.
It was quite impressive. Another forum post clued me into this, but can't remember who gets the credit for finding it.
MSI Afterburner will also work with Nvidia cards.
ack-ack
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Other than the screen capture portion is there any benefit to using afterburner instead of the native AMD overclocking in CCC?
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I don't use it for any of that... I did set a fan profile based on somebody else's for my same card, but I just use it for screenshots, FPS readout, and recording.
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You don't use an SSD for storage. You use it for performance, and store on your platter drive. FRAPS or MSI Afterburner should be set to save to your HDD, not your SSD.
The objective is better Fraps performance, Fraps is very intensive on hard drives, it follows that I should use the highest performing drive for Fraps captures. So why shouldn't I Fraps to the SSD? Recall I said:
The main problem there will be filling the SSD, but I can just transfer the files occasionally to standard hard drive for long term storage.
Are you saying a SSD won't actually work better for Fraps recordings, right up until it gets filled?
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Generally speaking you want to minimize the amount of constant writing to an SSD. It shortens the life of the drive. Granted that "life" may start out to be 5 years with average use, but with heavy use you may drop that down to 3 (or fill in whatever the real values are).
Recording to a second drive for FRAPs is what I do, but it's a 1TB platter drive.
I use the SSD to boot (and I have AH on it, the only game I put on the SSD), and record to my second, so that there's no bottleneck trying to write 2 things to the same drive.
So, second drive: yes. SSD second drive: nope. Only reason for an SSD is for a boot drive, really.
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So, second drive: yes. SSD second drive: nope. Only reason for an SSD is for a boot drive, really.
That's my plan, but I was thinking a 200GB one or so, so there's room to store more than just the OS, and for example, some Fraps footage.
Generally speaking you want to minimize the amount of constant writing to an SSD. It shortens the life of the drive. Granted that "life" may start out to be 5 years with average use, but with heavy use you may drop that down to 3 (or fill in whatever the real values are).
My research has indicated that it is random writes that kill SSD life. Fraps recordings would be sequential writes though, so I don't think they should be a problem. Although maybe I won't use the loop buffer feature they added recently.
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Fraps records really large files. It will fill up 200 gigs in less than a week recording just a few hours.
Semp
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The best method I have found is to use the MB controller in unison with a second controller like PCIe. If you fly off of the MB controller and record FRAPS to a HD on the PCIe controller the performance hit on your system is greatly reduced. You may notice a pretty good hit as you start recording just the same. And its cheaper than an SSD method even if you go with SATA3.
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Do you mean something like a PCI card with SATA headers?
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My research has indicated that it is random writes that kill SSD life. Fraps recordings would be sequential writes though, so I don't think they should be a problem.
It's more like any single cluster on that drive can only be written to "X" amount of times. After that it no longer works. So, what they do is they load-balance it... They scatter it across the drive to try not to hit the same clusters too many times.
This also means that if you have a 100GB drive, there is probably more than that much on the drive, as they keep some room reserved to do something (I can't recall what, but I think it was to hide the sectors that are no longer used and reveal fresh ones?).
So sequential or random it doesn't matter. They're not on a patter drive, so the controller is placing them where it thinks is best, not where the next free spot is.
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the controller is placing them where it thinks is best...
so, SDD leads to Skynet to Neo? :noid
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I also would have accepted MCP references, a la Tron.
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I just received the Plextor PX-256M2P SSD (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249013) I ordered. With luck I'll be installing Windows 7 (64 bit) on this thing over the Thanksgiving holiday and I'll see just how much a SSD affects Fraps performance (among other things).
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warning do not record fraps to ssd, they are huge files we talking gigabytes within minutes. it will fill up your space within a few days if you arent careful. if you must then only record when you are actually in a fight and not just the whole flight.
semp
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warning do not record fraps to ssd, they are huge files we talking gigabytes within minutes. it will fill up your space within a few days if you arent careful. if you must then only record when you are actually in a fight and not just the whole flight.
I have every intention of recording directly to the SSD, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a test, would there? If performance is noticeably improved, then I'll record directly to the SSD as the default setting as well. But I also intend to transfer the files off to a platter disk as soon as I'm out of the game, or at least before I fly and capture again. And no I won't be capturing the whole time, no one wants to see my climb out, lol. I do have a general idea of how much space each minute of footage takes up and will make sure not to fill the SSD.
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cool let me know how the testing goes and how it affects the ssd. if it works for you, i may get one for myself :rock.
semp
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I notice a hit in game but not with the film viewer
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The film viewer requires a lot less muscle to render than the actual game does, FYI. If you're getting slowdown in real-time recording, try rolling AH film and then record from the film.
I would suggest not rolling AH film WHILE running fraps, unless you have fraps set to save to a different HD than Aces High. You don't want too many competing I/O commands being run to save those big files on the same disk.
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Krusty
That's what Fraps experts told me. Play on one HD or SSD and record on a 2nd HD.
What size of SSD do you have and do I need a 10,000 WD for best recording or will my 1TB 72,000 work as my 2nd hard drive?
I did have a problem going from Fraps to Movie Maker, but the issue was an outdated version of Movie Maker that recorded in something like 480x480! The new Movie Maker is harder to use but HD quality.
Here is a question. I have about 1/2 TB of recordings of Aces High and want to cleanup my HD. What external HD would work and would it matter USB 2.0 or 3.0 or maybe wifi? Any external HD would you recommend?
Flifast
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The HD doesn't need to be blazing fast to save files with FRAPs. It's just that adding multiple simultaneous read/writes on the same drive will slow you down. The 1tb you have will do just fine.
Note, however, that FRAPS doesn't compress audio. You can cut down your files significantly if you re-encode them afterwards with MP3 audio compression. It will save a CHUNK of HD space. Trust me on that!
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Note, however, that FRAPS doesn't compress audio. You can cut down your files significantly if you re-encode them afterwards with MP3 audio compression. It will save a CHUNK of HD space. Trust me on that!
No. Just keep them regular size until you do whatever video project you plan to do. The audio only accounts for around 1% of the total file size.
Properties of a Fraps file of mine picked at random:
General
Complete name : D:\Fraps\Yak9TestLRearChase6.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 3.95 GiB
Duration : 2mn 17s
Overall bit rate : 247 Mbps
Video
ID : 0
Format : Fraps
Codec ID : FPS1
Duration : 2mn 17s
Bit rate : 246 Mbps
Width : 1 680 pixels
Height : 1 050 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 1.600
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 4.643
Stream size : 3.93 GiB (99%)
Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 2mn 17s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 411.2 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 23.1 MiB (1%)
Interleave, duration : 995 ms (29.86 video frames)
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That's not correct. I've recompressed FRAPs files by STREAMING the video (no changes in compression) or by choosing even very generous compression settings, but setting it to use MP3 audio. I've turned 3GB files into 300MB. I kid you not, recompressing to use MP3 CODEC on my FRAPS holding folder saved me something on the order of 100GB (it's a 1TB drive, I store a lot).
EDIT: You chose a 2 minute clip, though... I think you'll notice more savings on the longer clips, naturally, when you compress in MP3.
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That's not correct. I've recompressed FRAPs files by STREAMING the video (no changes in compression) or by choosing even very generous compression settings, but setting it to use MP3 audio. I've turned 3GB files into 300MB. I kid you not, recompressing to use MP3 CODEC on my FRAPS holding folder saved me something on the order of 100GB (it's a 1TB drive, I store a lot).
EDIT: You chose a 2 minute clip, though... I think you'll notice more savings on the longer clips, naturally, when you compress in MP3.
Yep Krusty is right - uncompressed audio stream is a killer. I once broke my nerves when I edited a home video of my friends bachelor party. No matter what I tried the file size was gigantic and I only had a limited space on the web host. Only after deploying the video I stumbled into the audio setting only to see that no compression was done on audio - and the file size went down 80% when I switched it to mp3.
I assumed that any video encoding tool would compress also audio by default - obviously I was dead wrong.
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That's not correct. I've recompressed FRAPs files by STREAMING the video (no changes in compression) or by choosing even very generous compression settings, but setting it to use MP3 audio. I've turned 3GB files into 300MB. I kid you not, recompressing to use MP3 CODEC on my FRAPS holding folder saved me something on the order of 100GB (it's a 1TB drive, I store a lot).
EDIT: You chose a 2 minute clip, though... I think you'll notice more savings on the longer clips, naturally, when you compress in MP3.
Then 99% of those size savings came from compressing the video. If you look at the properties of any video file in Media Player Classic, click the MediaInfo tab, then you can see how much of the file is taken up by video, and how much is audio. I can't find any video files on my hard drive where the audio is more than 6% of the total size. For Fraps files they are all in the 1% range, often rounded down to 0%. The audio component is literally insignificant compared to video, and this is an indisputable fact to anyone looking at the actual numbers and thinking mathematically.
In response to your edit, the length of the video file doesn't matter because its a ratio. The only thing that could matter is if you're recording video at really low quality settings, and audio at really high quality settings. That doesn't seem to make much sense though, and the amount of audio still wouldn't be significant.
Compressing raw Fraps video files to save space is fine, but you lose quality. Those savings are mostly not coming from getting rid of the audio, because there isn't that much audio to get rid of.
If you know you're not going to keep the audio, you can avoid this whole discussion and just uncheck the "Record sound" setting in Fraps. Then everyone here will agree that your entire Fraps file consists of nothing but video, and nothing is being wasted on audio.
Edit:
The best practice for the highest quality end-product is to keep everything in the highest quality format until the end, when you render a video file. If you transcode your Fraps files and then use the transcoded files as your source files for your video project, it will look worse than if you kept the raw Fraps files to work from.
Furthermore, and you perform this experiment easily yourself if you wish, its been my experience that options that reduce Fraps capture quality, such as "Half-size" recording, are not worth the reduction in quality. You'd think the files would be 1/4th the size, but they are much bigger than that. Same goes for "Force lossless RGB capture". I always enable lossless capture, because it looks far better and is only marginally larger on my hard drive.
Going back to my previous statement, "If you transcode your Fraps files and then use the transcoded files as your source files for your video project, it will look worse than if you kept the raw Fraps files to work from." If you must save space and cannot keep the raw files, you're better off capturing full-size lossless, then transcoding down, than you are capturing half-size and lossy. You definitely will lose a lot of quality if you both capture half-size and/or lossy, and additionally transcode down. You probably want to avoid that if you care what your video looks like.
One place you can safely save some size is by reducing the FPS. I see no need at all to capture at over 30 FPS. Furthermore, if you're in AH Film Viewer and capturing at half speed, you can halve your capture rate (to 15 FPS, for example) because when you double the speed again in your video editor, it will go back to being normal FPS. This technique will not have an affect on your video quality, unlike the other things mentioned.
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Then 99% of those size savings came from compressing the video. If you look at the properties of any video file in Media Player Classic, click the MediaInfo tab, then you can see how much of the file is taken up by video, and how much is audio. I can't find any video files on my hard drive where the audio is more than 6% of the total size. For Fraps files they are all in the 1% range, often rounded down to 0%. The audio component is literally insignificant compared to video, and this is an indisputable fact to anyone looking at the actual numbers and thinking mathematically.
I'm sorry but if the audio is recorded in wav format it will take typically 172 kb a second. You call that insignificant? :D In 5.8 seconds you'll be already at the megabyte mark. Coded in mp3 it's going to be around 16kb/s. Those fraps recordings you've seen must have either had no audio or you already had a codec in use. Wav audio is huge, believe it or not.
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I'm sorry but if the audio is recorded in wav format it will take typically 172 kb a second. You call that insignificant? :D In 5.8 seconds you'll be already at the megabyte mark. Coded in mp3 it's going to be around 16kb/s. Those fraps recordings you've seen must have either had no audio or you already had a codec in use. Wav audio is huge, believe it or not.
Just look at the Fraps file statistics I posted. The Audio is 23.1 MB. Out of a 3.9 GB file. That's far less than 1% of the total file size, even with your 172 kb per second figure. Lets pretend that you really gimp your video quality and take a Fraps file that's 6x the length that I take. So you get 6 minutes per 4 GB instead of 1 minute per 4 GB that I get. This is an extreme case by the way which won't actually happen. You're still only at around 5% of the file being used to store audio. Conclusion: Still insignificant.
Come on people, take some math classes. And stop trying to substantiate claims that are just wrong.
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Just look at the Fraps file statistics I posted. The Audio is 23.1 MB. Out of a 3.9 GB file. That's far less than 1% of the total file size, even with your 172 kb per second figure. Lets pretend that you really gimp your video quality and take a Fraps file that's 6x the length that I take. So you get 6 minutes per 4 GB instead of 1 minute per 4 GB that I get. This is an extreme case by the way which won't actually happen. You're still only at around 5% of the file being used to store audio. Conclusion: Still insignificant.
Come on people, take some math classes. And stop trying to substantiate claims that are just wrong.
On regular cases audio compression makes a big difference. Compressing CGI is extreme because it requires either a special codec or very high bitrate. I'd suggest trying out radgametools, their video codec is designed for CGI streams and produces crystal clear images with high compression.
I've used the free radgametools (Bink) compressor for making software tutorial lessons where it reduces the file sizes exceptionally without loss in quality. Enough so that choosing the audio compressor makes a large difference in file sizes. Moving game image might be harder case but OTOH it is named radGAMEtools. http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm
Some Reasons Why Folks Love Bink:
Bink videos look amazing! Bink can scale its data rate from 1200 kps for 1280x720p videos down to 75 kps for Nintendo DS videos. Bink will always make the best possible video for your data rate.
Bink is completely self-contained - it needs no special system software, it needs no other audio codec, it needs no other surrounding architecture. Just one small library and you are good to go - there are no external installation or dependencies.
Bink is super, super fast. In some cases, up to 10 times faster than other modern codecs. It's fast enough to use for in-game videos, as well as cut-scene videos.