What do you mean two or more drives? As in RAID? I'm already recording to a drive that's just a storage drive, not a system drive. The write speed on it is quite bad though as it's a few years old 5400 RPM disk.
New sample using x264 codec with the settings you linked, fumz. Do you see any difference to Lagarith ? Still: http://i.imgur.com/fO8vrMX.png Looks a little bit blurrier to my eye, e.g. if you focus on the edges between the building and the bright sky. Not sure if confirmation bias.
Not raid. Ideally you want two or more storage drives. Not partitions, two separate drives. In the Dxtory folder settings just add another drive, benchmark it, then in the movie settings tab check raw cap. If you're going to be using Lagarith (and yes, I see a difference in your vods) then this is how you want to do it. You can get away with using a single drive and outputting a lagarith avi in some games with no fps hit at all (like bf3) but not this one. First the game has to be really well optimized and ps2 just isn't.
I don't quite understand how Dxtory uses two drives. What's the benefit of adding another drive, exactly, and what does RawCap do? Does it take advantage of both drives while writing, but actually saving the files only to one drive in the end? Does the second drive need to be empty? Is there a performance advantage if using x264?
What YouTube should do is provide people with a preset tool with which they could encode the videos themselves, locally, and with a few click's of a button, instead of simply re-encoding the video on the server, making it look like shi* if you actually look closely enough and compare it. Right now you have to upload it in a uber format with as much bitrate, resolution as your bandwidth can manage in order for the end result to look any good, since YouTube is so awesome at halving/wrecking the quality of a local video that already is compressed in size and looks awesome with the low bitrate. You just might as well upload it in a lossless format. If the video would not match the settings recommended, then they also could just simply reject and delete the video/s or not start taking them in (uploading) in the first place. This way,.. they and everyone else would save bandwidth, processing power, electricity and the end quality would be awesome.
When you output an avi you're asking your cpu to a) capture, b) compress, and c) output an avi all on the fly. This takes cpu cycles away from your game. It's why you're seeing fps drops when using lagarith right now. You can get rid of the fps drops by using raw cap; however, raw cap requires two or more drives. The more the better. Again, not partitions as that's the same drive and you'll actually degrade performance, but separate drives. As we discussed earlier, dxtory hits the hard drive rather than cpu or gpu (grabs from frame buffer). When you record raw caps there is no compression and dxtory does not create for you an avi. This is something you have to do manually after a game session using the tools at the bottom of the app: it's the pink icon lower left called rawcapconv: raw capture converter. However, uncompressed lossless raw caps are huge. Think of it like a stripped raid array to speed things up. Neither drive "needs" to be empty; however, since you want the best possible performance, you want to use the leading edge of the drive (because it's the fastest part of the drive). The first thing you should do when installing and setting up new drives for recording is partition off XXXMB space for recording; this way, you will be assured that your recordings are being placed on the fastest part of the drive. You can then do whatever with the rest of the drive, doesn't matter. I should also mention that if you don't have new drives or are using old ones, it's not super critical that you place your recording folder/partition on the leading edge... I just said that so that you would know going forward how to get the best performance out of any new drive.
But why is it not possible to just rawcap to a single drive? I mean, what does the second (or third, or fourth...) drive do, if the first one records and stores the recordings?
It's not possible because that's the way the program is designed. Any single drive just isn't fast enough to capture raw caps; you need two, preferably 3, to capture that much data and at the same time not take an fps hit. Image a goes to drive 1, it's huge, so while image a is being written image b goes to drive 2. Again, think about it like a stripped raid array.
I meant that you should get an Alert when someone quotes your post. Earlier I posted without quoting and realized you probably didn't get an Alert, unless you had subscribed to the thread Will I have every other frame on one drive, and every other one on the other? Do the drives need to be identical or can I use e.g. one 1TB Caviar Black and another 3TB one, the latter being partitioned so I can save the compressed videos from rawcapconv on the latter partition?
Yes, every other frame will be on a separate drive. No, the drives don't need to be identical; it's "like" a stripped raid array only in how it functions, not in it's requirements. You can use any old drives. To convert raw caps into an avi, you just use the tool built into Dxtory. Again, it's the pink icon on the very lower left of the app. Click it, find your starting file, it will do the rest. You can save the compressed files anywhere you'd like. Just make sure it's someplace with enough space to work with them; the 3gb will be more than adequate.
Awesome, thanks so much for the detailed answers. I'm still working out the details of exactly how much space I need for everything but will most likely go with two drives then. I suppose the partitions for raw caps at the beginning of each drive don't need to be very large. One minute of 1080p@30fps should be about 10GB or so, so if I record for one hour and then do the conversion, I only need a few hundred GB on each drive to be safe, yeah? Does converting from raw caps to avi typically take a long time?
Anytime. There are certainly things faster in life than converting raw caps, that's for sure, but you have an i7 so look on the bright side: you're going to be done converting faster than your friends.
Ended up ordering two WD Black 3TB drives, should get them this week hopefully. Got a pretty good deal through my employer, 150 euros per drive. They retail for 175-190 euros or so. Will let u know how it goes
Which is why I use four in RAID 0. Video recording is pure sequential writing, so the primary advantages of SSDs are wasted on it.
That's not entirely true. An example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-hdd-performance,3023-5.html It has about 1.75x the performance of a standard HDD
Got the new drives installed. I created a large partition in the beginning of each drive and added those to Dxtory. Dxtory benched them to about 160 MB/sec, I set them to 150 MB/sec to be safe. I tested the framerate while recording in different modes: Code: framerate Not recording Lagarith YV12 to avi Lagarith YV12 to rawcap Dxtory raw RGB to rawcap Single disk 86-88 71-73 71-73 73-75 Dual disk 86-88 N/A 71-73 73-75 So I'm seeing a 2 fps performance improvement when recording raw RGB to rawcap. (The only difference between the single and dual disk modes for raw RGB was that the single disk was not able to handle smooth 30 fps output to file, it was hanging at around 27 fps.) But this is still far from not having a significant fps drop compared to not recording. Is there something to be done about this?
