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Hello! I want to create a couple of screen recordings while I'm playing your average mmo games on my computer. By and large my 4gb of ram does a pretty okay job, and I don't lose many frames per second. Still, I'd like my videos to be as smooth as possible.

Would adding more RAM help? Or is this a more graphics card/processor orientated sort of task?

Just point me in the right direction so I know what kind of upgrade to look for.

(I pretty much built this computer, if you need specs: viewtopic.php?f=33&t=74001#p1042580)

Depends on what you're recording with. If you're recording using something like MJPEG compression, you need all the CPU speed you can get. RAM ain't going to help much there I guess. If you're recording with just basic compression, it's probably best to record to a disk on which neither the game nor the OS is installed. If you don't, the disk access to load the game or do OS things can and will make the recording drop frames, in which case having more RAM to cache stuff and not have it swapped to disk will help.

what software are you using to record, and what settings are your recording at?

if it is FRAPS, you'll need a faster secondary drive. at 1080p60, your recording drive needs to sustain 180.25 MB/s, which is well out of reach for single hard drives, and even out of reach for many solid states.

moriz wrote:

what software are you using to record, and what settings are your recording at?

if it is FRAPS, you'll need a faster secondary drive. at 1080p60, your recording drive needs to sustain 180.25 MB/s, which is well out of reach for single hard drives, and even out of reach for many solid states.

I'm currently using Camtasia.. which i just read says it's CPU intensive. So I suppose more RAM wouldn't help there.

I have considered FRAPS before. I am a bit confused, though.. are you saying that just having a second harddrive will work, or do I need a special one?

He's essentially saying you'll need either a fast SSD or a dedicated multi-stripe RAID-0 array to record at that resolution using FRAPS.

moriz wrote:

what software are you using to record, and what settings are your recording at?

if it is FRAPS, you'll need a faster secondary drive. at 1080p60, your recording drive needs to sustain 180.25 MB/s, which is well out of reach for single hard drives, and even out of reach for many solid states.

Actually, looking at my fraps files, the filesize recorded to disk is not that high. at 1920x1200p30 you get 50MB/s so 60fps would give you 100MB/s at the same res. Mind you, you are still correct that most drives wont be able to make that even that sustained once you are out of the right zone or cant do a continues file. I have a velociraptor, first model 300GB, and while it's decent topping out at 125MB/s + speeds, it wont be able to record at 1200p60 for any longer amount of time which is why I usually do half resolution p60 which lands at about 25MB/s. Depends on the game. I play at least on 1920x1200 and preferably at 2560x1600, but the latter is just to forget if one wants to record at 60fps.