[Frapsing] Going from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440

[Cattlehunter]

I got a GTX680 for christmas, and since I've been looking for an excuse to get rid of my old monitor for a while, I was considering buying an ultra highres one now that I got a card that can handle it and the money to do so.

My biggest consideration is that I fraps a lot (in WoW, mostly), and I was wondering if nearly doubling the amount of pixels would cripple my ability to do so? Currently I capture to a separate generic 7200 RPM HDD dedicated just to fraps video, and I'm able to easily do so at 1920x1080 at 30-40 fps with no issues at all, but would going from 2 million pixels to over 3,6 million pixels be too much for a single HDD to handle?

Could I get around it, if it became a problem, by capturing at half-resolution, and would that case a noticeable decrease in quality or look really weird?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and maybe respond to it!

[foxbird]

Here's a dime's worth of information, from my personal experience.

I'm running a Dell 30" at 2560x1600, and while it's great for multi-tasking, running WoW full screen isn't really where it's at for me.

There is a LOT of screen real estate to cover, and I find that looking to the corners of my screen for cooldowns, buffs, and other informational bits, that I get a little disoriented and dizzy. Peripheral vision helps somewhat, but that only gives you the briefest flashes of info, and it does require a good look to verify what you saw. Depending on how far away you sit, this may not be an issue, but if you have a standard desk and have it about 3 feet from you, that's been my experience.

To that end, I run wow in a window at 1920x1200 and just push it to a corner or in the middle of the screen. Then I have room for IM's, webpages, and even close-to-real-time DPS graphs. With that setup, you can tell Fraps to capture just that window and be done with it.

However, your question was about if fraps could keep up. It depends on your codec, cpu, and the drive you're writing to. If you're doing full-frame uncompressed AVI, the drive is your only consideration really. The rest of the codecs all have various performance hits and will likely impact your CPU. The drive is your next challenge. At 2560x1600 uncompressed, you're dumping about 12MB of data (16 if you have alpha transparency information) per frame. Recording at 24 fps nets you about 270MB/s that you'll need to write. Assuming you have at least a SATAII (300MB/s) drive you should be relatively okay. A dedicated drive is best, which you have. If you have a secondary controller on your board, so much the better.

You'll likely be using some form of compression for your videos, and I can't speak to their performance hits. But, if you have a modern-ish CPU, you likely won't have too much of an issue, especially if it's got a separate core you have it run on. Running fraps at half-res still requires either CPU or GPU time to reduce each frame captured. So, there's still a performance hit, but it greatly reduces the amount of time a compressor (usually the slowest part) will need to spend working. If you're doing uncompressed video, then there's little savings if the hard drive can keep up.

Hopefully that turns out to be useful. I can run some fraps test full screen and give you my specs if you're interested. But, I think my recommendation is go for the monitor. I do enjoy the extra space and versatility. But, run WoW windowed. Obviously, the choice is yours!

[Butler Log]

Recording at 24 fps nets you about 270MB/s that you'll need to write. Assuming you have at least a SATAII (300MB/s) drive you should be relatively okay. A dedicated drive is best, which you have. If you have a secondary controller on your board, so much the better.

No mechanical drive on the market can write 270 MB/s.

[foxbird]

No mechanical drive on the market can write 270 MB/s.

This is quite true. I was overlooking the 7200RPM part the OP had in his writeup and was thinking SSD's an RAID (my current setup). My apologies for missing that and thanks for catching it for me.

You would certainly need something much faster to write it out, assuming you have FFUC video, which you likely don't. Compression is usually where it's at for that reason alone. Unless you're running a movie studio.

[Synthaxx]

RAID0 of 2 high capacity HDD's would be the best solution for frapsing. People could go on and on about the risks of RAID0, but having done that for 2.5 years back from 2009, it was quite an ideal solution.

[Butler Log]

It isn't like you're going to be archiving the footage for any long period of time on the RAID0 array, if one of them dies on you it isn't going to be the end of the world.

[Faithh]

Why would you use Fraps? It's recording on a normal HDD around 260000 Kbps while it's going to be encoded to ~10K Kbps.. Better just use a recorder program which allows you to set the quality lower so it's less intensive on the hdd.

[n0cturnal]

Why would you use Fraps? It's recording on a normal HDD around 260000 Kbps while it's going to be encoded to ~10K Kbps.. Better just use a recorder program which allows you to set the quality lower so it's less intensive on the hdd.

Most people prefer to work with RAW video or as close to it as possible. That way you can fine tune it to whatever purpose you want.

[Jinto]

Here's a dime's worth of information, from my personal experience.

I'm running a Dell 30" at 2560x1600, and while it's great for multi-tasking, running WoW full screen isn't really where it's at for me.

There is a LOT of screen real estate to cover, and I find that looking to the corners of my screen for cooldowns, buffs, and other informational bits, that I get a little disoriented and dizzy. Peripheral vision helps somewhat, but that only gives you the briefest flashes of info, and it does require a good look to verify what you saw. Depending on how far away you sit, this may not be an issue, but if you have a standard desk and have it about 3 feet from you, that's been my experience.

Should try moving your UI elements towards the middle of the screen and customizing the max zoom. That way you can play at a higher zoom level at 2560x1600 and focus only on the middle part of your screen for essential information. Your peripheral vision just gives you a bit more awareness of what is around you. Of course if you play at the max zoom allowed by wow at 1920x1200 this won't apply to you but I doubt anyone plays that far back since you would have issue seeing the "bad stuff". FWIW I used this approach to play at 2560x1600 for years in a top US guild.

[foxbird]

Should try moving your UI elements towards the middle of the screen and customizing the max zoom.

I've been doing that. Fortunately I mostly play as a fire mage, so I've got my camera zoomed quite a ways out to see more of the battlefield. I've also dragged a lot of information near the center of the screen, at least in terms of cast bars. The parts that I've not done yet are to play with UI replacements. Most of what I have now is pretty good. I spend 3/4 of my time watching a cast bar and my peripheral vision is only neccessary to alert me to a proc (of which I really only have 1 and it has UI in the center of the screen). So, it has improved quite a bit. The only information I don't have readily available in front of me is my ignite and living bomb bars. The tracker I use would eat up too much screen space in the center of the screen and isn't transparent enough. So I leave that in a corner.

Of course, putting all your info in the center of the screen defeats the purpose of having a huge monitor to begin with (in my opinion) It's unused space if you don't have some aspect of the UI occupying it. Maybe it looks pretty, but if you don't look at it, then there's not much point in having it

I do appreciate the info though. There are a lot of different folks, and if you enjoy the extra-large resolution and use it well without too much strain on the eyes and body, then you're in a good way I'm sure the OP will enjoy the monitor, regardless of how they use it. I certainly don't regret the purchase I made five years ago.

[Marest]

For Fraps, 1080p is around 70MB/sec given 60 frames per second. Most 7200 RPM drives can deliver these speeds consistently, so that's why you can't had any issues. Going up to 1440p however, the requirement moves up to 125MB/sec. Now, this is consistent read during the full duration, and while a Western Digital Caviar Black can deliver ~130MB/sec consistent writes they are, in my experience, not fast enough for 1440p. A Samsung Spinpoint F3 can reach 145MB/sec consistent writes, but it fluctuates too much to handle 1440p iirc.

Best way, if you want to record your native resolution, is to record to a RAID0 array with two drives. Or, record using a software that can record to several drives at once (DXTory) or simply record at half resolution (which is, at 1440p, 720p).

One thing to note is that pixels don't scale and recording at 1440p and then outputting to 1080p will make the image look muddy.

[shroudster]

go for a 27" 1440p ips screen and see if you can buy an exact same 7200 rpm as the one you got . (usually easier to raid similar series drives, raid 0 being the most suitable option to keep on frapsing without losing quality)

[DeltrusDisc]

Like others, I would just suggest you buy 2x1TB 7200RPM drives and stick them in RAID0. I suggest Samsung SpinPoint F3 or WD Caviar Black for this task.