Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

The #1 thing overlooked on fraps: Hard Drive. It's saving uncompressed video on a drive at full resolution and whatever FPS. That needs a LOT of speed.

Borrow zurginator's PC.... he might help...

(09-17-2010, 12:16 PM)zurginator Wrote: [ -> ]The #1 thing overlooked on fraps: Hard Drive. It's saving uncompressed video on a drive at full resolution and whatever FPS. That needs a LOT of speed.

RAM Drives have more than enough speed to record. I use eBoostr as a temporary RAM drive (it automatically transfers to HDD as it's being written to). Allows me to take 1080p videos at 108fps max (I experimented with Counter Strike: Source). 720p at 60fps is easily handled.

RAM Disks average (assuming DDR2-800MHz RAM) 5315MBPS. Your average HDD is roughly 80MBPS sustained write. 1920x1080x32x60 (1920x1080 res, 32 bit color, 60 fps) = 474 MBPS, far above even a velociraptor (they're recommended to record 1024x768 @ 60fps). World's fastest harddrives can only muster 220MBPS write (Intel X25 Solid State). Use the guide below if you want to record @ 60fps. It lists the minimum requirement to record sustained 60fps (you might temporarily get 60fps recording with a slower drive, but it wont last)

If using a RAM Disk, take your RAM Speed (the PC2-6400 or PC-3200 part) and take roughly 15% off to get a rough estimation of the average write speed in MBPS. Better RAM and better motherboards/CPUs (depending on where the memory controller is) will produce better results.

2560x1536 (Dell 30" monitor): 900MBPS -- RAM Drive or RAID0 five X25 Solid State Drives WITH dedicated RAID controller
1920x1080 (1080p): 474MBPS -- RAM Drive OR RAID0 two X25 Solid State Drives WITH dedicated RAID controller
1680x1050 (roughly 19-22" screen): 403MBPS -- RAM Drive, or RAID0 two X25 Solid State Drives; onboard RAID controller will do
1280x720 (720p): 210MBPS -- Intel X25
1024x768 (XGA): 180MBPS -- Any Solid State Drive, Properly formatted Velociraptor, RAID0 three basic hard drives
720x480 (480p; ED): 79MBPS -- Any properly defragged 7200RPM HDD
640x480 (VGA): 70MBPS -- Any 7200RPM HDD
320x240: 17MBPS -- Any HDD manufactured after 1985.

(09-17-2010, 06:54 PM)mew905 Wrote: [ -> ]World's fastest harddrives can only muster 220MBPS write (Intel X25 Solid State).

Try 400mbs. Sandforce based drives ftw.
The Intel drives acutally suck at writes. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025&cm_re=intel_x25-_-20-167-025-_-Product
35mb/s peak on the X25s. Remember we are looking at sequential, not random.

Vertex's are much better at this, holding ~150mb/s. I'm looking to upgrade mine to a Sandforce drive (or 2), which can pull over 250mb/s write. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231378&cm_re=sandforce-_-20-231-378-_-Product

Quote:World's fastest harddrives can only muster 220MBPS write (Intel X25 Solid State)

First of all a solid state drive is not a hard disk drive since it does not use a magnetic disk. Second of all we have SSDs that reach into multiple GB/s read/write, they just aren't mainstream yet (affordable). You can even buy drives that reach over 1GB/s sequential read on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227524

I never had a problem recording my games at 1920 x 1200 @ 60 fps on fraps using a 500GB 7,200 RPM WD. In fact I didn't notice any difference vs. my 10,000 rpm samsung. As long as I am outputing to a different drive than the drive that the game and os are on I am fine. Problem is it fills my entire drive in about 60 minutes, although that does not make sense since that would imply a write speed of 120 MB/s which any 7,200 rpm desktop HDD is incapable of.

Quote:RAM Drives have more than enough speed to record. I use eBoostr as a temporary RAM drive (it automatically transfers to HDD as it's being written to). Allows me to take 1080p videos at 108fps max (I experimented with Counter Strike: Source). 720p at 60fps is easily handled.

Problem is if your using a ramdisk as a buffer like you said it should only last a few seconds before it fills up. Let's say your recording at 1920 x 1080 at 60 fps, 480MB/s and your using a 2.5GB ramdisk to buffer for a 70MB/s HDD. 480 - 70 = 410 2500 / 410 = about 6 seconds until the buffer fills up. So something is not being accounted for if your able to do this for an extended period of time, might be related to my results which don't make any sense either.

(09-18-2010, 05:22 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:World's fastest harddrives can only muster 220MBPS write (Intel X25 Solid State)

First of all a solid state drive is not a hard disk drive since it does not use a magnetic disk. Second of all we have SSDs that reach into multiple GB/s read/write, they just aren't mainstream yet (affordable). You can even buy drives that reach over 1GB/s sequential read on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227524

If only you could boot from those, one would be going in my SFF.

Apparently they don't play nice though.

erm all this is meaning nothing to me and not helping :S

(09-18-2010, 05:22 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:World's fastest harddrives can only muster 220MBPS write (Intel X25 Solid State)

First of all a solid state drive is not a hard disk drive since it does not use a magnetic disk. Second of all we have SSDs that reach into multiple GB/s read/write, they just aren't mainstream yet (affordable). You can even buy drives that reach over 1GB/s sequential read on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227524

I never had a problem recording my games at 1920 x 1200 @ 60 fps on fraps using a 500GB 7,200 RPM WD. In fact I didn't notice any difference vs. my 10,000 rpm samsung. As long as I am outputing to a different drive than the drive that the game and os are on I am fine. Problem is it fills my entire drive in about 60 minutes, although that does not make sense since that would imply a write speed of 120 MB/s which any 7,200 rpm desktop HDD is incapable of.

Quote:RAM Drives have more than enough speed to record. I use eBoostr as a temporary RAM drive (it automatically transfers to HDD as it's being written to). Allows me to take 1080p videos at 108fps max (I experimented with Counter Strike: Source). 720p at 60fps is easily handled.

Problem is if your using a ramdisk as a buffer like you said it should only last a few seconds before it fills up. Let's say your recording at 1920 x 1080 at 60 fps, 480MB/s and your using a 2.5GB ramdisk to buffer for a 70MB/s HDD. 480 - 70 = 410 2500 / 410 = about 6 seconds until the buffer fills up. So something is not being accounted for if your able to do this for an extended period of time, might be related to my results which don't make any sense either.

interesting points (I'm aware of the SSD HDD difference, its just easier to think of them as the same as they both do the same job). My drive is short-stroked, however, to retain the peak read/write as long as possible. CS:S will record for 25 minutes before a 1GB RAM buffer runs out. Strange though as like you said, even assuming peak speed constantly, the buffer would fill up much faster. perhaps FRAPS recording doesnt require the x 32 part of the equation? producing much lower results. I'll look into it when I have time

@mew905

Yes. Everything you said makes sense but something about your math has to be wrong because the results just don't add up. I just don't know what.

Quote:erm all this is meaning nothing to me and not helping

Sorry. We all got carried away.

1. Use lock threads to core in dolphin (it's in the configuration settings).

2. I'm guessing you have dolphin and your games on drive C. If so make sure fraps is saving the output to somewhere on drive D. If that's not where dolphin/your games are well just make sure that fraps is writing to a different drive than dolphin and your games are on.

3. Get a decent air cooler and OC your cpu if you can.

4. Open fraps and dolphin. Open task manager (ctrl + alt + delete). Go to the "processes" tab. Find dolphin.exe or something similar and right click it, select "set affinity". Then make sure only cpu 0 and cpu 1 are checked. Find fraps.exe or something similar, right click it and set affinity, make sure only cpu 2 and cpu 3 are selected. You can also try setting their priority (right click them in the processes tab) to "realtime" instead of "normal", that may or may not help and it might make dolphin or fraps crash, but try it anyways.

When I'm trying to set the affinity for the fraps.exe, it is saying 'The operation could not be completed. Access denied'. How can i get round this?
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