PA Community Media: Streams and Channels!

perhaps that i'll make some vids on YT; depend on my config ^^

my HDD has 12gb of space left, your average 15 minute fraps video is 30-50gb. plus, my weak 7850 can't record at a good enough rate with all settings maxed. I only get around 20 fps while recording, I need 60.

seeker what game did you use to test that? I have a 7850 too and i get 60 fps recording League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 (plus a bunch of other games i tested) at max settings. Try jiggling the Catalyst settings around, some innocuous stuff really messes it up.

I have a 6850 and I can record supreme commander 4v4 in 1920x1080. You gotta take a look at your temperatures and settings

You definitely don't need a pvr or elgato for PC recording, that is the silliest thing ever. I have been in the youtube world for over a year I know what I say :mrgreen:

The fps depends on the Game you are playing. I have been recording FA with my old 4850. It wasnt perfect but it worked. I doubt that it will be a problem to record PA with an 7850. The game might do some pretty fancy stuff in some ways, but in the end it is not a crysis 4.

About the hdd-space: Just get a new HDD instead. Even an SSD would work

Gamebooster, decent temperatures, medium settings and 1280x720. Every game that exist should record easily at 60 fps (even though 30 is all you need, especially for a RTS) if you have a proportional CPU to your current GPU. (sandy/ivy bridge i5/i7)

HDD's are still a bit on the expensive side ever since that flood in Asia but they are affordable, a good 7200 rpm 1TB seagate drive should be enough. SSD's are way too expensive for what they offer. I want one anyway...

I believe you're bullsh*tting, my video card is a piece of crap, incapable of recording at a good speed. Only $180, you get what you pay for.
This is besides the fact that I don't overclock it, since the minimum PSU required is 500 watts, and my PSU is 500 watts. I have a 600 watt one, but I won't use it, since my current one has MUCH better cable management.

I had a 4850, it was WORSE than what I have now. Should have just scrapped my next project and got a titan.

All in relation to oneselfs pocketmoney. ^^ With the coming 1TB SDDs under 1000 euro, I will never go back to HDDs... NEVER!!!!!

And also the GC has only minimal to do with recording, CPU and the storage device are the important factors. The only thing your GC has to do is get good FPS on a regular basis. 7850 Should be acutally enough (especially with 720p monitor) to handle most games on medium. If you want to go high on new games you can forget that. ^^ 79XX is at least needed for 1080p or high settings. Although it still remains to see what PA needs, I doubt that a 79XX is needed for basic 720p stuff. On what games does your 7850 underperform? You mentioned that you use high settings? With the wrong games the 7850 really was a bad decision then.

It performs fine, 60fps on all games, but since my youtube videos scale down (despite the fact that more people own 1680 by 1050 monitors than 1980 by 1080 monitors), my capture card will help me capture the same video, but at a different resolution. battlefield runs HORRIBLY while recording, around 15 fps, world of tanks is a bit better, and FA is rather... bad. Here's my really small youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ImTheSeekr

Ehh did I understand this right:
-You play on 1080p
-it works fine with 60fps
-you want to scale down to 720p?
-while you record and scale down the fps drop really low?

What program are you using? Why are you scaling down to 720p and what has that to do with your GC since it is not involved with the scaling down process?
Of course considering I did understand at all what you wrote before. ^^

I have a 1680 by 1050 monitor, youtube only accepts 1080p, thus it downscales to 720p, thus the laughable quality of my videos. I assume PA will be graphically intense, and supcom lags with a lot of units when you're not recording. The videos aren't actually a clear indicator of my video card's recording performance, I had a twitch broadcast that I deleted that sucked, 640 by 480 at low quality around 10 FPS. Only is bad on conquest for some reason. The FPS is much worse when I play than in the videos as well.

Your GCard has no recording power, that is almost completely handled by the CPU/RAM/etc... I btw wrote that now for the 3rd time. ^^ Does supcom slow down while you look at the lots of units or also while looking at the zoomed in naked ground? If it slows down while looking at the ground then the possible bottleneck and the Recording bottlenecks are as already multiple times mentioned:
-CPU
-RAM
-Storage Device

So the only thing you would gain from a capture card would be a more relaxed CPU. However much that would help you. ^^

My last supcom experience is yearsssss away so I don't know how good it fares with today's hardware. I guess the other guys can help here and clarify at which point supcom slows down or if it is at all normal that it slows down on today's systems.

P.S. Streaming is a whole different story(especially if through another program) since internet bandwidth is also a factor and different settings are used.

Knowing your CPU and RAM would be very much preferred.

According to your resolution, you should be recording 1280x720. If you actually play and record in 1680x1050 then of course the downscale will ruin the quality.

I have a i5 2400 processor, 8GB of ram and the 6850 card. No overclocks and I can record pretty much anything with no issues at medium settings regardless of the resolution(then again I'm not a big fan of 2012 games)
Capture card for PC is a big waste of money, you either have a lower end CPU or your PC is overheating or its too clogged with data and junk. (your C drive should always be at least 15% empty)

Also Dxtory is able to downscale the recording for you to whichever resolution you want during the recording(no quality loss) but it adds extra processing to your CPU

OK, i've run some extra tests. Playing the base SupCom with no frills, only one AI. I recorded in 1920x1080 using Fraps , a 7850 running on High settings, and an i7-2600k non-overclocked with Turbo enabled. I got 60 fps most of the match, constantly recording, and started getting lower into 45 as pathfinding started to assault the CPU after i broke 500 units. With the superior pathfinding we're expecting from PA, should we assume this'll be close to our experience?

PA CPU stuff will mostly be handled by the Server, so if you play dedicated, the only important limit should be the GC. If I would have to guess I would say that a 7850 should be enough for 1050p MEDIUM (maybe low on fancy stuff) settings for large(not considering XXL for the moment as we talking alpha at the moment ^^) scale skirmishes.

Even 2560x1600? ^^ Not to mention multi-monitor resulotions.

What about 2013? ^^

If CPU is the problem and the person has no interest in changing it, then it can come in handy. If you are doing really fancy stuff a capture card is also a good choice but I don't see that in this case here. ^^ Also we should call it the OS-drive since the labeling isn't as consistent as it used to be.

Indeed, now we just need to clarify his bottleneck.

I'm recording SupCom on medium settings at 1080p with 2 monitors (1920x1080 and 1366x768) my main monitor being the recorded one obviously. Starting FPS is around 50 and after about 10-15 minutes of the game it drops to 30-25, doesn't really bother the quality since I have 30 as the max number of FPS to record at.

I'm looking forward to COH2 and Rome 2 TW so I might be able to test my November 2011 PC build with those 2013 games

I don't talk about resolutions above 1920x1080 since I don't have bigger monitors :mrgreen:

I go out 30gb after 5 minutes of recording... these videos will take forever to upload. a 24 hour cast, for example, would be nearly 9 terabytes to upload to youtube. At a speed of 300kb/s... nearly 1000 hours. I'm screwed.
Another plus of capture cards: built in compression, unlike fraps.

Wait a minute, 9 terabytes? Nah, you have to encode that video dude. You shouldn't upload raw video. Try running it through Movie Maker or Premiere. A 40 gb video for me, encoded at 720p, usually gets less than half the size. I don't see any difference in quality.

Also, this has become a tech thread, and i love it. When the alpha starts, as I said before, I'll put up the OP in the General Discussion. You shouldn't do tech there, please.

You really shouldn't be making videos until you learn all the basics :mrgreen:

When you record footage (I recommend Dxtory with the Lagarith Lossless codec, around 100 gigs for an hour if you record 1920x1080), you put that footage into Sony Vegas/Premiere Pro/Windows Movie Maker and render it out in whichever resolution you recorded at.

A 100GB raw file becomes a 3-4GB file at most. Most of my current 1920x1080 videos are around 2GB for half an hour. Depends really on what happens on screen, if I keep it zoomed in for the most part then the video is bigger.

As for casting, if you do a 24h marathon on Twitch and if you have decent upload speed so you are able to stream 720p(300 kb/s is borderline for HD streaming) then it will get uploaded automatically as you stream(to both Twitch and Youtube, you just have to transfer the video once you are done streaming, will take some time processing though)