Sorry for the extra long post, the question needed some background.
Recently i bought a new PC : AMD 8350, GTX 660 (non Ti), 8Gb RAM, 1Tb Hdd. I chose the AMD over an Intel i5 because of the performance improvements Logan pointed out(in an older video) and for the future apps that will surely need more cores. Also i was thinking about streaming and/or recording videos.
So I've been trying to record some game play to see how it's done and setup my rig for future recordings. I have tried out some of the available software I found online such as Camtasia, Camstudio, FRAPS and OBS. The first three weren't to my linking - either no video was recorder or the file-size skyrocketed (100+GB for 30 mins) and the hdd couldn't handle the full load resulting in big fps drops. Therefore I went for the OBS. Easy interface, encoding on the fly, really cool... or so I thought.
Now for the problem. I've tried to record a few LoL(maxed out) games with different setups. I currently run dual monitors 1280x1024@60fps and the game takes about 12-18% of the processor. No matter the setup the recorder bottlenecks somewhere and the processor spikes to 100% for about 10-15 seconds and then goes back down. I am able to get smooth frame rates for a few minutes and then it happens again.
Can anyone please help me with this problem? Can you tell me what you are using to record - hardware/software, or the setup for OBS?
Bandicam is a decent piece of software if you configure it correctly to output directly to H.264. Although you will either have to pirate a serial key for it or purchase one alternatively depending on your financial situation as the free version is just poop.
Tnx for the recommendation. I will probably try it out :D, though 39 bucks is pretty expensive... I might be thinking of developing my own for that price :))
Most likely. OBS does not capture properly if the game is in fullscreen. Always window it. Borderless windowed might work, but I find best results with an actual window. Also while doing this, mess with different resolutions and keep an eye on your results with different ones to find the one that works best for you and your PC.
Thanks for the advice! I've tweaked OBS, set it to record in HD @ 30fps and LoL in borderless at the same resolution but set it to run @60fps. The recording was a smooth 30 fps even though the game dropped from 60 to 30 from time to time it never went below. When I set the fps to 60 in OBS I got really nasty fps drops ingame even though the CPU went up only to 60-ish % so I still don't know where the bottleneck is :(.
As soon as I will have more time on my hands I will test it out some more with different settings and maybe i'll even post my findings in a video :P.
I personally use Dxtory with either Lagarith Lossless or XviD/x264vfw (I know, I'm a heretic) and it works great. You might get extra performance using x264vfw using a quantizer of 18 and allowing Dxtory to use 2 cores for recording/encoding the footage. It's 38 bucks, so a tad cheaper than Bandicam.
Others have recommended the $30 Mirillis Action. It uses a proprietary lossless codec for AVI recordings (for 1080p, it does about 19MB/s) but allows for on-the-fly H.264 encoding up to 720p (1080p or up if you were using a 3rd gen i5 or i7), and only takes up 2 to 3% of the CPU. I personally didn't like it due to the proprietary AVI codec thing.