Is my PC powerful enough for HD recording?

[Kagato]

I want to record wii games in 1080p. At the very least, 720p. I'm a LPer on youtube and I'm just tired of the jaggies and blurriness I get when recording with my Dazzle, which is when I found out about the HD capabilities of this emulator.

My biggest concern is lag and audio desync when recording off emulators of any kind. So I want to list my system specs and get your opinion on if I can play and record Wii/Cube games smoothly, and if so at what recommended settings. All my specs are on my profile, but for swiftness, I'll post them here:

Operating System: Windows 7 x64
Processor/CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.00GHz
Video Card/GPU: MSI Cyclone GeForce GTX 460
Memory/RAM: Corsair 2x 2GB (4GB)
Dolphin Revision Currently Using: 3.0-776 x64

As for recording software, I have access to Fraps and Bandicam, but I can also get PlayClaw and VirtualDub if one of those is more efficient for play&record.

[NaturalViolence]

What HDD or SSD do you have?

[Kagato]

(10-20-2012, 10:09 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: What HDD or SSD do you have?

I plan to record to my external Toshiba 320GB HDD since I know HD recording will take up a ton of room on my PC's normal HDD.

However, if that's too slow, I can make room on my internal HDD and just record hour-long sessions and edit in parts. However, I am on my laptop so I can't tell you those specs right away.

[Garteal]

In my personal testing, FRAPS gave me the best performance while recording in comparison to PlayClaw.

If you want to record without lagging, you'll need a fast HDD.
Ideally, you'll want two seperate internal harddrives for the best results.
One from which you run your OS and applications/games from, the other to record to.
That way you'll have all the write access available for FRAPS.

If you've got a decent HDD, something like the HD103SJ, which has great write and read speeds, you should be able to record and play on one harddrive with minimal impact.
(Depending on the games, the framerate and video size you're recording. I've had zero issues recording at 2560x1600 recording at 30FPS or so)

[Kagato]

(10-20-2012, 10:20 AM)Garteal Wrote: In my personal testing, FRAPS gave me the best performance while recording in comparison to PlayClaw.

If you want to record without lagging, you'll need a fast HDD.
Ideally, you'll want two seperate internal harddrives for the best results.
One from which you run your OS and applications/games from, the other to record to.
That way you'll have all the write access available for FRAPS.

If you've got a decent HDD, something like the HD103SJ, which has great write and read speeds, you should be able to record and play on one harddrive with minimal impact.
(Depending on the games, the framerate and video size you're recording. I've had zero issues recording at 2560x1600 recording at 30FPS or so)

How about if I have my FRAPS record using the remaining 2 of my CPU's cores since the Dolphin only uses 2? Would that make a difference or does it depend on drive speed only?

[Garteal]

FRAPS can take advantage of two cores which it already does by default.
There's no need to manually designate your cores to the applications.

Most of the time, the performance issues you get is due to a slow drive or low disk space.
You should benchmark your harddrive and let us know the results.

Do the following

Quote:

1. Download CystalDiskMark (I use the .zip, portable edition)
2. Launch the program, and configure as follows:
3. The first dropdown box is the number of times it runs the test, set it to 3
4. The second dropdown box is the size of the test file being written. Set it to 4000MB
5. The third dropdown box is for selecting the appropriate drive for the test
6. Click on the green "Seq" to start the sequential write test.
   

Source

The information you should report should be something like this.

Code:

Sequential Read : 67.656 MB/s
Sequential Write : 67.782 MB/s

Test : 4000 MB [D: 87.1% (60.3/69.2 GB)] (x1)

[admin89]

Quote:Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.00GHz

You'll need to overclock . 3.4GHz is a good start
Btw , i store Dolphin and game on external HDD and record to SSD (Sound crazy huh? )
Fraps is the only one i use for Dolphin
Camtasia studio is more powerful than Fraps , not only record video but also edit it

[Kagato]

(10-20-2012, 10:44 AM)Garteal Wrote: FRAPS can take advantage of two cores which it already does by default.
There's no need to manually designate your cores to the applications.

Most of the time, the performance issues you get is due to a slow drive or low disk space.
You should benchmark your harddrive and let us know the results.

Do the following

Quote:

1. Download CystalDiskMark (I use the .zip, portable edition)
2. Launch the program, and configure as follows:
3. The first dropdown box is the number of times it runs the test, set it to 3
4. The second dropdown box is the size of the test file being written. Set it to 4000MB
5. The third dropdown box is for selecting the appropriate drive for the test
6. Click on the green "Seq" to start the sequential write test.
   

Source

The information you should report should be something like this.

Code:

Sequential Read : 67.656 MB/s
Sequential Write : 67.782 MB/s

Test : 4000 MB [D: 87.1% (60.3/69.2 GB)] (x1)

Read - 69.67
Write - 67.44

[Garteal]

You should be able to record at 720p and 1080p at fullsize with 30FPS.
You can also setup up to 60FPS for 720P. 60FPS for 1080p will lag you severely.

Keep in mind that Dolphin is very CPU intensive where every game performs differently.
What games do you intend to record?

[Kagato]

(10-20-2012, 07:47 PM)Garteal Wrote: You should be able to record at 720p and 1080p at fullsize with 30FPS.
You can also setup up to 60FPS for 720P. 60FPS for 1080p will lag you severely.

Keep in mind that Dolphin is very CPU intensive where every game performs differently.
What games do you intend to record?

Right now, I really wanted to try to do Project Zero 2 (Fatal Frame 2 Wii Edition). But when I gave that a try, there was lag and audio garble, without recording, until I reduced everything all the way down to default wii stats. That's fine... if I didn't already own a Wii and could record normally off that. XD