MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 Beta 16(2013-10-25)

Discussion in 'MSI AfterBurner Application Development Forum' started by msi-afterburner, Oct 25, 2013.

  1. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    I’ve read a lot of reviews related to NVIDIA ShadowPlay during the last couple days and there are typical misunderstanding patterns in many of them, so I decided to write this short summary to give you better understanding, guys.
    Most of users (and surprisingly reviewers) assume that the main performance hit for any videocapture oriented software comes from realtime video encoding. That is quite typical and mostly wrong assumption. Modern videocapture applications are multithreaded and modern CPUs have multiple cores able to process multiple tasks in parallel, so realtime video encoding is normally performed in background thread(s) and often with lower priority. That is why when you’re capturing video in the game which is not using close to 100% of CPU time on all CPU cores, background video encoding have enough system resources to run in parallel and hardly affects game performance. In other words, having fast hardware encoder like NVENC or Intel QuickSync simply allows you to encode better quality video with higher encoding framerate or more efficient compression ratio in realtime, but it doesn’t seriously minimize videocapture related performance hit like many reviewers say.
    The main and the real performance penalty for videocapture application is … a simple process of capturing frames from DirectX application. DirectX rendering pipeline is asynchronous, so multiple frames are being processed in parallel by different stages of the pipeline. And that’s where our performance penalty come from – DirectX architecture is simply not built with idea of effective frame readback from the very end of rendering pipeline. So each frame capture via DirectX causes DirectX rendering pipeline to be flushed, CPU may stall until GPU finish flushing the pipeline and provide captured frame back to CPU, etc, etc. This means that each simple frame capture iteration hurt the efficiency of prerendering, may seriously reduce the performance of multi-GPU systems and so on.
    And that’s where NVIDIA ShadowPlay magic begins. I’m very supersized to see that all reviewers focus on Kepler’s NVENC hardware H.264 encoder only without even mentioning Kepler’s innovative and unique NVFBC (Frame Buffer Capture) and NVIFR (Inband Frame Readback), which also help NVIDIA ShadowPlay a LOT. Those two are probably even more important videocapture oriented hardware technologies introduced in Kepler GPUs. Both are promoted by NVIDIA as ultra fast low-latency GPU/DMA accelerated framebuffer capture techniques, both are targeted at cloud gaming / GRID systems (you can read more in this presentation). It is some very very “light” kind of NVIDIA’s “Mantle” in frame capture functionality area – NVFBC and NVIFR are available via NVAPI and provide developers very effective way of frame capture via direct access to hardware bypassing the limitations of DirectX API.
    So ShadowPlay’s success is built on two key hardware technologies: NVFBC for very effective frame capture and NVENC for very effective frame compression. BTW, NVFBC is a direct reason why ShadowPlay is not capturing video in windowed mode, if you follow the link above, you’ll see that NVFBC is able to grab whole frame buffer only.
    And now some really good news: using NVENC is third party video capture applications is currently troublesome due to some strange licensing scheme applied to it by NVIDIA. Hope it will change in future, because competing Intel QuickSync H.264 encoding is freely available to any developer and it does great job. But NVFBC and NVIFR interfaces are available to any NVAPI developer, which means that very effective frame capture can be easily added to ANY existing third party videocapture application right now with minimum development cost. So at least frame capture related bottleneck can be taken out of context on NVIDIA Kepler hardware. Personally I’ve chosen to power videocapture engine of RivaTunerStatisticsServer v5.5.0 by NVIFR, even considering that NVFBC provides a bit faster capture, I won’t like to sacrify windowed videocapture support. And I’m pretty sure that other video capture tools will also get support for those new NVIDIA technologies soon.
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2013
    akbaar, CaptaPraelium and yasamoka like this.
  2. burebista

    burebista Ancient Guru

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    Alex, as usual, is a real pleasure to read your explanations. :thumbup:
     
  3. WhiteLightning

    WhiteLightning Don Illuminati Staff Member

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    very interesting read unwinder! thanks.
     
  4. EdKiefer

    EdKiefer Ancient Guru

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    should make it a separate sticky thread for info .
     

  5. Pepa1

    Pepa1 Guest

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    any advice pls....
     
  6. BenYeeHua

    BenYeeHua Guest

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    Thank for the explanations, it is great. :)
     
  7. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    Wait for somebody else, sorry.
     
  8. pimp_gimp

    pimp_gimp Ancient Guru

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    I get it too on both Beta 15 and 16 as well, hopefully MSI will fix whatever issue is going on with their end.
     
  9. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Is anyone else unable to set one of the F keys as the toggle to enable / disable the OSD ?

    I used to have F9 as the on/off toggle but it won't allow me to set F keys any more
     
  10. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    Define "won't allow". Are you unable to define the hotkey in GUI or the hotkey is being ignored?
     

  11. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    Define "won't allow". Are you unable to define the hotkey in GUI or the hotkey is being ignored when you hit it in games?
     
  12. n2k3

    n2k3 Member

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    Hey, a small UI bug I'd like to report: using mouse scroll wheel in the monitoring/graph panel 'is not in sync' when manually dragging/click the scrollbar. This behavior occurs in both attached & detached monitoring panel.

    Here's an example to elaborate: when opening MSI Afterburner, drag the scrollbar of the monitoring panel to the bottom, then scroll down a bit, the scrollbar & view will jump to the top.

    Thanks for this awesome software :)
     
  13. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    If I press any F key inside of ABs settings to assign the key, it is being ignored, but pressing say a NUM PAD key, it accepts and assigns it fine

    Also the key I have assigned to toggle or enable/disable is being ignored in-game too, so if the game does not automatically call OSD then I have no way to enable it, also if I want to disable it when it does work, I can not
     
  14. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    It can only mean that you assigned the same key to some other function in AB. Click <I> to see the info about all assigned hotkeys inside AB.
     
  15. ivanosky

    ivanosky Active Member

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    Unwinder, have you considered adding support for NVFBC, since it offers faster capture, and letting users choose which to use? It would be very good to have faster video capture if I only play in fullscreen mode.
     

  16. BenYeeHua

    BenYeeHua Guest

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    The issues is the strange licensing, so...
     
  17. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Assigned hotkeys
    ________________________________________________________________________________
    Toggle OSD : NUM 1
    Show OSD : NUM 2
    Capture screenshot : NUM 3
    Capture video : NUM 4

    This is all of the hotkeys assigned, pressing any of the F keys acts as if I have not pressed a key at all

    EDIT - Just had a thought, although I wouldn't imagine it to be the problem, I have not installed the Logitech software for my Keyboard & Mouse because it halves the battery lifetime of my mouse for some reason

    But F keys are not special keys that would require the software I wouldn't have thought... could be the issue though, I`ll install it and check

    EDIT - Yea my bad, it was the Logitech software, F keys are working again

    Stupid keyboard
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2013
  18. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    Some development news:

    1. After deeper testing I've noticed that currently NVIFR works properly in D3D9 applications only. So frame capture performance boost between RTSS 5.4.0 and 5.5.0 can be measured in D3D9 applciations only, D3D1x still fall back to old traditional DirectX based capture implementation. Not sure if it is my implementation or NVIDIA driver issue.
    2. My R9 290 (Hawaii Pro) arrived at last. So I'm working on getting voltage control working. But I cannot give you any ETA, voltage control will be available when it is done.
     
  19. BenYeeHua

    BenYeeHua Guest

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    Ok, thank for the NVIFR information.
     
  20. BababooeyHTJ

    BababooeyHTJ Member Guru

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    Thanks for the update, much appreciated. :)
     

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