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ShadowPlay - GVR - Mirillis Action - Fraps - Show your performance hit

Caporegime
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Essex innit!
As we have quite a bit of recording software available to us, I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread for people to post their findings. I am a big fan of ShadowPlay and the early versions were quite big on performance hits but seems the latest version is much better. I did some testing using the in-game bench, so as not to skew any of the results and I set the same settings for both ShadowPlay and non ShadowPlay. I ran my CPU @ 4.7Ghz and my GPU at 1241/3758Mhz and used the highest settings in game.

As you can see, the performance hit is very negligible and you wouldn't even know it was recording. I remember using FRAPS many moons ago and that was a massive performance hit but times have changed and with ShadowPlay and Raptr's GVR, things have improved tremendously.

Anyway, here is my findings:

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As you can see, Sleeping Dogs gives a performance hit of ~ 2.7%


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Sniper Elite V2 gave a performance hit of ~ 4.5%


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Tomb Raider gave a performance hit of ~ 2%


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Thief gave a performance hit of ~ 3.5%


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Batman Arkham Origins gave a performance hit of ~ 4%


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Hitman Absolution gave a performance hit of ~ 1%

And there you have it. Very impressive in my opinion and a year or so ago, I never imagined recording gameplay to be so easy and to have such little requirements on performance. The highest performance hit was with Sniper Elite V2 and that was 4.5% and the lowest was Hitman Absolution and that was 1%.

Please feel free to add your own findings to this (good or bad) but there was a lot of work gone into this, so I would appreciate any narky digs/comments to be left out and regardless of what is what, this is to discuss what performance hit people are getting and to maybe give some tips.

For me, I found the best settings were to have a higher CPU clock and to record directly to my SSD. Not sure if recording to a mech drive makes things worse but an SSD is ideal for sure.
 
Soldato
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Can you try bioshock infinite Greg? I did a similar thing the other day and lost 22% of my frame rate, looking at your results in other games I'm thinking something's a miss at my end.
 
Caporegime
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Can you try bioshock infinite Greg? I did a similar thing the other day and lost 22% of my frame rate, looking at your results in other games I'm thinking something's a miss at my end.

Tested it quickly and with ShadowPlay recording, I got 115.77 and with ShadowPlay off, I got 122.31, so ~ 5.5% of a performance hit.
 
Caporegime
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Nice work gregster, do you know if physical/system RAM makes a differance with this??? Does it temp store it there or on disc before you save it???

It saves to a temp file location, so I wouldn't think system ram was that important.

I know that SLI gives a big hit for 4K or did do, so will have to run SLI recording to see if that is the same at 1080P
 
Soldato
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Remember that if you test again Raptr GVR, you have to use identical quality settings. 1080p 60fps shadowplay might not be the same as the 1080p setting on GVR, so its important to get that nailed before even attempting to compare them, or its not a fair test.

The settings of the game don't really matter, but the settings on the game recording software do :p
 
Soldato
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Interesting results.
It seems the worst drop off was in a TWIMTBP title and the least drop was in GE games.

Regardless though the results were really good.

I still don't agree with a few of your percentages though!
 
Caporegime
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Essex innit!
Interesting results.
It seems the worst drop off was in a TWIMTBP title and the least drop was in GE games.

Regardless though the results were really good.

I still don't agree with a few of your percentages though!

Yer, I am just using rough percentages and anyone/everyone is welcome to calculate them exactly if they want. I would like to see some others do some benches and maybe we can find the ultimate way to record with minimum hits.
 
Soldato
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Yer, I am just using rough percentages and anyone/everyone is welcome to calculate them exactly if they want. I would like to see some others do some benches and maybe we can find the ultimate way to record with minimum hits.

Fair enough, but some go to 1 decimal place, that's quite accurate for 'rough'! :)
In fairness I believe you were rounding up...
 
Caporegime
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Essex innit!
Fair enough, but some go to 1 decimal place, that's quite accurate for 'rough'! :)
In fairness I believe you were rounding up...

I started doing this last night and it took quite a few hours and wanted to get it done before I went to work today at 11:45 and all I had left was the calculations and with my math being so bad, I did it the quick rough way and hence why I put ~ on them :D
 
Soldato
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Interesting results.
It seems the worst drop off was in a TWIMTBP title and the least drop was in GE games.

Regardless though the results were really good.

I still don't agree with a few of your percentages though!

It all depends what method you're using to calculate. To be honest for the purpose of this thread big / small is accurate enough.
 
Soldato
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Good idea greg and well done. :)

Looking forward to the results.

@Pgi,

Iirc, you have Assetto Corsa???

If yes, a special shadowplay request for you-driving a white Abarth 500 EsseEsse and post it up for me please?


If Pgi doesn't have it, would one of the great oCuk forum members here maybe manage to do a run for tommy, please?
 
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Soldato
Joined
17 Aug 2009
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10,719
Massive difference between fraps and SP.

Everyone knows there's a large performance hit with fraps but SP doesn't affect the game in any meaningful way.

Only issue is the format it saves in, I've been long used to editing in VirtualDub which is an AVI editor but SP saves as MP4. Converting can be done but is far from desirable.
 
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