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Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandicam

Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2012 10:03 pm
by nfsnobody
Hey guys,

I've recently started recording Minecraft on my PC - along with audio commentary - using 32 bit Bandicam and Audacity for microphone input. My computer is as follows:

* Windows 8
* 3GB DDR2 RAM
* Core 2 Duo CPU
* 256MB RAM graphics card (nVidia of some sort, few years old)
* 120GB 7200RPM SATA drive - OS
* 1TB 7200RPM SATA drive - Videos

I've been tweaking settings in my graphics control panel and within the game to get the FPS up. Finally I got to the point where I could comfortably record at 30fps. Yesterday, I installed Microsoft Office 2010 and VMWare vSphere for work purposes (sometimes I work from home). These had large installation files and fragmented the machine a bit - I ran a defrag and everything seems OK.

Unfortunately since then, my framerate will start around 40fps when recording and drop over 5-10 minutes to 30-40, then 20-25, then around 10-15 and stay there. This persists even if I stop the recording and start it again; When not recording I have the game set to limit to 60fps, which it sits on quite comfortably. Closing the game and reopening resets the FPS for the next recording.

I did notice Audacity writing its temporary files to the OS drive, so I tried without Audacity - no change. I've monitored the CPU, memory and disk I/O during recording - none of them hit anywhere near their max.

I realise I need to get new hardware and I'm hoping to over Christmas, however until then I'm trying to get this machine to work. Could anyone provide any suggestions to help me get a stable framerate when recording?

Thanks all - much appreciated!

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2012 1:09 am
by Cipher
Minecraft is known for it's memory leaks, and you said you monitored memory whilst recording, but how much memory do you have assigned to minecraft? if it hits the limit, it can become very choppy

Regards,

Alex

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2012 7:56 pm
by nfsnobody
Hi Alex,

Thanks for your reply.

I've actually dropped Minecrafts allocated maximum memory to 350MB as per a recommendation from sp614x (the guy who created Optifine, see here).

That being said, I've seen javaw.exe peaking up to 500-600MB.

I'll try pumping the allocated memory up a little and see if it helps.

Cheers,

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2012 8:25 pm
by nfsnobody
Hey guys,

Tried pumping up the memory, no benefit. Tried reinstalling Vanilla minecraft, no benefit (dropped FPS without Optifine).

One thing I've noticed is that the FPS overlay on the main Minecraft menu screen seems to sit at "36" when not recording. It used to sit in the hundreds. The timing correlates to my recording slowing down.

Cheers

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 1:43 am
by Cipher
you should do a test where you play for a while without recording and see if the frames drop over time, that way you could isolate it to bandicam or not

now depending on how full your drive is, it could also be that the recordings are filling up too much disk space / fragmenting the drive even more, so you might want to try recording onto an external as well ;)

Regards,

Alex

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 4:27 pm
by nfsnobody
Hey Alex,

Great idea! The FPS does not drop at all when I am playing normally. It's just when recording.

I did set up an external SATA drive (1TB 7200RPM NTFS) which Bandicam now does all it's recording on. I've checked fragmentation a couple of times - it's tightly packed and < 1% fragmented on both drives.

I also worked out why my FPS wasn't going any higher than 60 when playing and 36 on loading screen. In my nVidia settings I had Vertical Sync set to "Adaptive". After swapping that back to "Off" my FPS was no longer limited, however the framerate dropped to 15-20 almost immediately after starting recording, as opposed to gradually in the past.

EDIT: Additionally, I've just done a benchmark on sequential write speeds to the secondary drive dedicated to recording. It got about 109MB/S write and 111MB/S read, which sounds sufficient to me.

EDIT 2: I did try dropping my screen resolution to 1176x664 (720p) and it did help a little bit - I could get an FPS of 15-30fps while recording, generally sitting around 20ish. However it was only a few weeks ago I could record easily at 30fps without any of this. So I'm very confused as to why I can't still do this.

Cheers

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2012 10:49 am
by Mau1wurf1977
Your CPU is quite slow. A modern i5 or i7 would do the job.

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 5:34 pm
by nfsnobody
Hi Mau1wurf1977,

Whilst I do realise my hardware isn't the most up to date (and have stated that previously), that's not really related to my question. I am keenly aware that modern processors, more RAM and a better video card would all help.

A couple of days before I made this post I could record with this hardware at 30fps. Now I cannot. I'm trying to find a path back to that.

Thanks,

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 8:51 pm
by Mau1wurf1977
No worries!

You could do a system restore back a few days and see if it fixes the issues.

Also check windows update if any driver updates got released?

And run the CPU monitor in the background just to see if it's really the CPU :)

Re: Dropping framerate when recording Minecraft with Bandica

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 9:01 pm
by nfsnobody
Hey Mau1wurf1977,

Thanks for your quick reply. Unfortunately I don't do system restores. I also don't have updates allowed, so that's unlikely to be it.

And I have monitored CPU, Disk IO (both drives) and memory to see if anything was being maxed out or even close - nothing :(.

Cheers,