For all the people that do DAOC movies what graphics card do you have?

illu

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Lo peeps

I found that my Geforce 4 Ti4600 / 1GB / AMD 3000 usually runs the game pretty smooth pretty much all the time, but I was playing with gamecam the other day and had the quality settings right up, and it was noticeably j-e-r-k-y and it felt like I was walking in treacle.

I was just wondering what graphics card is good enough to play the game and record without any loss in preformance? Is it possible on a budget of £150? I know the Geforce 6800 is one of the best, but it costs a hell of a lot.

Basically what card do you use - and what affect does the recording do?

Oli - Illu

PS And I have the settings on quality as I want it to look nice :)
 

Helme

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Best thing is having a second computer who is the one recording so the one you play on don't get any stress.

I don't know how this work thought :p
 

liloe

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AMD 1900+
1gig ram
Radeon 9500Pro
Raid-0 2x80gig IDE-100 HDD's ( not top notch, but raid makes up for it )

With that I can record 1024*768 at 25fps, which gives good quality

Well....it works when cata models are disabled, cause else it's lagparty. Tbh I need a new comp, smth like AMD Opteron with 2gig ram and Serial Ata Raid-0 =)) and ofc a PCI-Express card....ehm, ok enough dreaming.

Generally recording doesn't leech on the gfx card, but on Processor and HDD, because you write tons of data per minute.
 

Naffets

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What Helme means is the best thing is to export your video using s-video to a 2nd pc while you have standard display via d sub to your regular monitor. Have a tv card in the 2nd pc and set it to s-video in and ofc tune/record. This will mean there is the minimal of performance loss on your system since another pc is focusing on writing the video file to a hdd.

Other than that you need a pretty powerful system to record. my pc is:

AMD64 3000
1gb DDR400
main hdd used is 300gb sata drive with 16mb cache.
9800 pro 128 running at xt clock speeds because i can <o/

And i can record and play at the same time without much of a problem, lags quite a lot during siege/zergs, where as the 1st of the two methods will manage it a lot better but ofc requires 2 pcs, and a tv card / s video cable. Been meaning to set mine up like this for a while but i cba.
 

Jika

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P166
Xmas Classic
64!!!11 MB ram
2mb gfx card


perfect .. I had that PC 7 years ago :)
 

illu

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Naffets - what is the quality like on that set up?

Are there any 6600 users out there that have tried recording on their PC's?

Is Fraps less CPU intensive or more intensive than gamecam?

Ideally I'd like to do it all on 1 PC but it sounds like you need something pretty damn powerful to not get any side effects like the lagging / jerking.

Oli - Illu
 

Kcinimodus

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I use fraps and it runs ok, around 20fps ingame which is doable. Funny thing is when facing zergs it doesn't really drop, so my gues is it doesn't depend entirely on your graphicscard. Must be CPU since it needs to compress and write it on your HD. I got 2x160 serial ata raid setup so I don't think that's the limiting factor in my computer.

I tried gamecam, but even at highest quality settings the image is ugly, text pretty much unreadable and stuff like that. It runs alot smoother though than fraps.

I don't run catacombs client in rvr btw, just Toa client with a couple of Toa graphic thingies turned off (old trees and terain etc, I don't really care about the graphics in rvr).
 

Aiteal

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illu said:
Is Fraps less CPU intensive or more intensive than gamecam?

Gamecam running in cached mode isnt too bad, overall, gamecam has a lower performance impact on your machine, but this is refelected in the quality of the vids it makes.
 

Lireihuan

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p4 3.0 oc 3.2 1g ddr400 6800GT

daoc runs perfectly smooth unless it's network issue.

recording with Sony Handycam DCR IP1
 

illu

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Right - I've been playing a bit more with Gamecam and Fraps and like them both for different reasons.
Gamecam saves a lot of HD space, and I like the cached data it does.
Fraps gives slightly better quality - but then it churns out HUGE avi's.

What settings do people use to squish down the AVI to something nice? I tried a few codecs, and was playing with some DivX ones to try and squeeze it down to the best quality and smallest file size - and also trying to make it as compatible as possible.

I was using VirtualDub-1.5.10. Anyone got any settings that they use to compress AVI files without losing too much quality?

Oli - Illu
 

Naffets

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Quality recording straight to hdd using fraps is great if you record it full size, and when i play daoc at 1600 x 1200 thats quite good xD

I have 1.5tb of hdd space so its not an issue for me, about 600gb is free for fraps use :|

still think its better to have a 2nd system with a tv card etc. Also could use upgrading my 9800 pro to a x800 xt or even an x850. Can get a x800 xt pe for £300 locally.
 

Lothandar

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illu said:
Lo peeps

I found that my Geforce 4 Ti4600 / 1GB / AMD 3000 usually runs the game pretty smooth pretty much all the time, but I was playing with gamecam the other day and had the quality settings right up, and it was noticeably j-e-r-k-y and it felt like I was walking in treacle.

I was just wondering what graphics card is good enough to play the game and record without any loss in preformance? Is it possible on a budget of £150? I know the Geforce 6800 is one of the best, but it costs a hell of a lot.

Basically what card do you use - and what affect does the recording do?

Oli - Illu

PS And I have the settings on quality as I want it to look nice :)


You won't get good fps while writing gigs of videostream on your hdd. Or the humongous files being created passed your attention? :p
 

illu

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Right - the mission has continued......

I tried the link 2 pc's up running s-video cable, 2nd PC using a tv card to capture the desktop on the other PC, but tbh even though there was no stress on the primary gaming computer, the quality was poor, and it did not capture the whole screen.
This was probably due to some settings being wrong perhaps, but with hours of tinkering trying different settings, I could not get the picture any better, or it just froze the Capture PC and then it needed to be rebooted to get the capture working again.
I tried the Pinnacle PC Rave Card, which after the cd not working with xp sp2 (nice one pinnacle), I downloaded some drivers from the website that got it working, and on the capture screen preview - it looks pretty good, but on the actual capture - the colours were washed out and no full screen.
I then tried a Packard Bell PC-TV100 tv card. Same problems, the drivers were poor, updated them, the capture was poor and no full screen.

If anyone uses a 2nd PC to capture footage - what tv card have you got in there and what settings do you use to capture?

Next went down the new graphics card route (even though the CPU/Hard drive might have been a better route ^^), and got a 6600GT card for about £140. Installed this, defragged all the hard drives on my PC, moved the paging file to another hard drive, and using gamecam on 25fps capture, it still is slightly jerky - but tbh it's liveable with. I haven't tried fraps since doing the defragging and stuff, but I think it is more intensive, and as the current set up seems to work fine at the mo - I'll keep it like this for the moment.

Future ideas may be to get a faster hard drive in the machine, possibly a SATA 10000 rpm one, maybe a faster CPU, and one day in a year or something when the prices are more reasonable, maybe a 6800GT.

The quest continues.......

Oli - Illu
 

Belomar

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Speak to Joor or Madition on this forum, they both should have experience on TV cards and capturing on a second computer.
 

liloe

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Madi is TEH best, helped me out tons for this subject =)
 

illu

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Thanks for the info Liloe, I will pm Madi soon :>

Oli - Illu

In the meantime I have another problem with Gamecam seeming to crash DAOC ToA at random intervals :/ I have made a thread on the technical boards, but might make one here as more people read this board and use gamecam etc.
 

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