Questions and notations on Predator™ performance in TERA (Unreal Engine 3)

Discussion in 'MSI AfterBurner Application Development Forum' started by Catamaytryc, Dec 9, 2012.

  1. Catamaytryc

    Catamaytryc Guest

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    First I want to thank Unwinder for an awesome job, I've been using Afterburner since late beta and like it well. My post is not a complaint, it’s an observation and request for feedback from any others.

    I was wondering if there were any other TERA or UE3 based game users I could compare notes with. I’ll abbreviate ‘Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 64 bit’ to ‘SMSP12’ within.

    I've always had a heavy FPS hit when recording videos in TERA. This is also true on my new system (i7-3770K @ 4.2 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 2x GTX 680 2 GB, 256 GB SSD, 3 TB HDD, NVIDIA 310.70 drivers).

    I've tested RTV1, MJPG, Lagarith and x264vfw at various framerates (30 fps, 60 fps for refresh rate and 80 fps for game cap). Invariably my FPS falls into the teens and sometimes single digits. The best results I've had are Framerate: 30 fps, Limit 30 fps and even then I have bad drops.

    Lagarith: Fairly smooth gameplay but somewhat choppy video. Works with SMSP12.

    MJPG: Fairly smooth gameplay and video but I don’t like the quality or color balance. Works with SMSP12.

    RTV1: Variable gameplay smoothness and smooth video. Good video quality since 2.3.0. Works with SMSP12.

    x264vfw: Variable gameplay smoothness (better than RTV1) and smooth video. Good video quality. Corrupted video in SMSP12 (even in edit mode).

    Truthfully I’m not sure fps matters too much as RTV1 output is smooth and looks good. I would prefer x264vfw but I just cannot get it to work in SMSP12 (even when I make sure to install x264vfw64 in the SysWOW64 folder).

    The main problem is the performance impact in the game, especially when the action gets heavy. I don’t know if this is inherent to TERA and its buggy implementation of the Scaleform® UI or if other UE3 engine games have similar issues.

    Even if there’s no solution I can live with it and I’ll stick with Afterburner and Predator™. In my opinion FRAPS, Bandicam and DXTORY have nothing over Afterburner’s quality and simplicity of UI.
     
  2. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

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    First, there will always be serious performance hit on multi-GPU system during recording video with any tool (both SLI and Crossfire). Use search, there is a thread explaining the reasons of it in details.

    RTV1 should provide the smoothest gameplay of all available modes, because encoder is very fast and doesn't eat too much CPU time. But it can be bottlenecked by slow HDD, because compression rate is rather low (especially with quality enhancements of 2.3.0, enabled by setting quality slider to >25%).

    It is strongly not recommended to use h.264 for editing video, because it uses a lot of delta-frames so it is rather hard for editing applications to process independent frames correctly. MJPG is de-facto standard if you're capture video for future video editing, RTV1 or any other mode compressing each frame independently also suits fine for editing videos.
     
  3. Catamaytryc

    Catamaytryc Guest

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    Solved: Questions and notations on Predator™ performance in TERA (Unreal Engine 3)

    You have solved my problems Unwinder and I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.

    I couldn't find a particular thread, my keywords may have been off but I did find this comment from you from 12-2011:

    Good information, this is a big help.

    Thanks for giving a easy to understand explanation for this. I've see posts (some with screenshots) in other forums about the distortion from x264vfw in Vegas / Movie Studio and no one has been able to offer a solution. I will stay away from x264vfw for editing.

    Here's the new test: Disabled SLI, RTV1 at 100%, 16:9 1080p, 30 fps / limit 30 fps, recording to the HDD. I recorded 16 minutes of test footage.

    Gameplay: Absolutely smooth, even when a lot of spell effects are on the screen. 30 fps most of the time (occasional drops to 25 fps).

    Video: Absolutely smooth and excellent quality. It's almost indiscernible from the actual game. I kept wanting to steer and press keys watching the playback.
     

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