An HHD specifically for recording content from Dxtory

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joshkh

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Hi, I'm currently in the market for an HHD that I can use solely to record content to it from Dxtory. I've seen this question answered a few different times, however, I've seen different answers and I'm hoping to get some information specific to my situation.

I saw this HHD suggested and I've considered buying it, however -- if it's going to put me down $80 I want to make sure it does exactly what it's supposed to. I will be recording 1920 x 1080 HD, 60 fps. Will this drive be fast enough to withstand limiting my FPS?

I'm mostly concerned because the write speed of my current HHD is ~ 160 MB/s, and that's around what this new HHD is advertised at too, but nevertheless I've heard it suggested as a good option.

So -- can you all help me out? Would this be a good purchase for recording 60 fps, 1920 x 1080 content?
 
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pickandwhammy
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amigafan

amigafan

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What kind of video codec (and quality settings) will be used to compress video data on the fly? For example if it's lossless video I don't think the 160 MB/s will be enough for 1080p @ 60 fps. But for codecs such as x264 it will be more than enough regardless of quality.
 
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joshkh

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Hi, I totally forgot to mention that. I am using x264, here's exactly what my settings are:

fGv57F4.png


I should mention however that what I currently have is around 160 MB/s and it does seem like it's being limited. Getting 30-40 fps when I should be getting 60.
 
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amigafan

amigafan

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It could be that the video encoding is limiting the CPU so it can't feed the GPU with game-related data fast enough because it's too busy encoding the video on-the-fly.

I'm not familiar with Dxtory but perhaps you can make it use the hardware-based encoder which uses GPU to encode (much faster) such as NVENC for Nvidia or VCE for AMD.

Quick googling found this guide for owners of AMD cards: http://www.overclock.net/t/1469871/dxtory-hardware-gpu-with-no-cpu-use-h-264-encoding-game-capture-but-only-for-radeon-owners-atm

As for Nvidia, perhaps try popular OBS software which has support for NVENC (or try Shadowplay which comes bundled with Nvidia drivers).

Sorry I can't be of more help :)
 
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pickandwhammy

pickandwhammy

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There are two main activities that occur when screen-capturing in real-time:

1. Captured frames are compressed using the specified codec. - CPU heavy
2. Resulting video stream is written to a disk drive. - disk heavy (sequential write, to be precise)

Both these tasks are inversely proportional to each other: if the demanded compression is too CPU intensive, frames will be lost and there will be jitter and lag. If the compression is low, the resulting stream will be very large in size and disk-write will bottleneck the output. Additionally, if you're capturing a game, then there is added overhead of the CPU to process computation for each frame (and more, for example physics calculations occur multiple times per frame).

So the idea is to balance both these tasks such that the capture quality is as good as can be - this can only be achieved via trial-and-error. Of course, the desired resolution and frame-rate are major factors too. For 1080p x 60 fps, you would ideally need an SSD with high sequential-write benchmarks and a powerful multi-core CPU to match.

As mentioned by @amigafan, your best recourse is to use Shadowplay or VCE to use the GPU to encode instead.
 
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joshkh

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Thanks for the suggestion! I'm very familiar with Shadowplay and used it for around a year, but I really like the ability to split game audio and mic audio among other features of Dxtory, so I want to follow that path for now.

For more information on your response -- just a few days ago I upgraded to an i7, and I'm confident that my PC can easily handle it, really my only concern is bottlenecking at this point. (Also, I read that SSDs aren't good for this kind of thing and run down really quickly? I saw a link leading to that HHD I linked in the original post instead and that's why I started this thread).
 
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pickandwhammy

pickandwhammy

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Glad to be of some help!

I really doubt that an HDD can handle 1080p@60 FPS. I scoured the following threads and they seem to echo my apprehensions:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/286809-32-recording-high-quality-video
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1633914/storage-screen-recording-gaming.html

However, they seem to be centring around uncompressed video, so in your case since you have a powerful i7 you could definitely pass it through a codec before saving to disk. As for the concern about SSDs wearing out, it's not that much different than HDDs any more, especially with MLC SSDs. Price/GB is still many times more for SSDs, though.

There is one roundabout way you could take: get the HDD and try it out, if it works flawlessly, cheers! If it doesn't, use that HDD as storage and get an SSD just for recording (and possibly editing). Unless you already have enough HDD storage, in which case you could try returning the HDD (depends on return policy, of course).
 
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joshkh

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Hey, thanks for doing some research for me! I ended up going ahead and just buying this SSD, I think trial and error is the way to go.
 
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