All Alienware Laptop Gaming Videos Thread

Why would you pay a penny for inferior recording software that crush FPS and write huge uncompressed files when there are multiple free solutions out there that utilize the NVENC and VCE hardware video encoders found on modern Nvidia Kepler/Maxwell and AMD GCN GPU's to record with almost zero overhead?

The Gaming Evolved App is AMD's clone of GeForce Experience. It has a ShadowPlay equivalent which does manual recording as well as always-on shadow recording and Twitch streaming. It also does automatic driver updates and game optimization if that's your cup of tea.

In addition, MSI Afterburner, OBS, and the regular Raptr app can also utilize NVENC and VCE to do low-overhead recording and streaming. GeForce Experience is massive bloatware plus I don't stream, so I use MSI Afterburner with the NVENC plugin and it works great.

 

Thank you ! This is the advice I was waiting for!

Seems to work well using MSI afterburner. FPS down a bit though. Wolf New Order on max settings is a little slow while recording but still playable. Once I have the 680M I will upload some videos of that fantastic game!

 

I have never been able to get Raptr to work correctly and I consider it to be a far worse example of bloatware than NVIDIA Experience. It has loads of crap that I have no use for whatsoever, not the least of which is a social media feature, LOL.

However, I would really like to use OBS for game capture. It's pretty slick, but I've tried both 32-bit and 64-bit and neither one works correctly for me. OBS does a really wonderful job of desktop capture, but I cannot get the game capture to work. The audio is often missing, and it never records gameplay, just a black or gray screen depending on the game. I've read everything in the OBS forum that I can find related to that, set it up as recommended and Googled for fixes and the result is always the same... black or gray screen recorded and audio often missing. And when it does capture audio, my speakers get muted during the capture, LOL. No changes in settings seem to fix it. I have tried with SLI enabled and disabled... no dice for anything except desktop capture.

I never have trouble with game capture using Fraps, MSI Afterburner or ShadowPlay, but Fraps and Afterburner cause a bigger hit on performance than ShadowPlay does. Fraps is junk for game capture IMHO due to the performance hit, but I like using it for benching.

 

I will try shadowplay with the 680M then. Cheers for all the advice guys!

 

Performance impact shouldn't be too great. I suspect you haven't configured it properly. Did you select the AMD VCE plugin? In Afterburner settings, go to the video capture tab and select external plugin for video format. Click the dotted box and select the AMD VCE plugin. You can configure the quality preset and bit rate and also benchmark your settings to determine their impact on encoding performance. Use the MKV container.

I'd recommend starting with 16:9 720p and working your way up through the different frame sizes up to full frame/16:9 1080p to find your best balance of recording quality and game performance. In terms of performance impact, recording resolution and quality preset are the biggest culprits. Bit rate has almost no impact. I get minimal to moderate FPS drops on my 7950 @ 1150/6400 when recording at full frame 1080p/Quality preset/50 Mbps, although I normally use Quick Sync on my i5-2500K since it is much faster. The 7970M is slower card so you might have to dial the quality preset and/or resolution down to get acceptable performance. Quality preset should always be the first thing to go as the visual differences between Speed/Balanced/Quality are very subtle, but lowering resolution will definitely make your videos turn out worse.

Yeah I wouldn't touch Raptr with a ten-foot pole. But GFE? Almost as bad. Adds like 10 seconds to my boot time and 5 different startup processes and services and a hefty chunk of RAM and CPU time. Don't need automatic driver updates and game optimization. No thanks. MSI Afterburner does both manual and shadow recordings just fine and can write the rolling buffer directly to system memory without needing a RAM disk, which reduces SSD writes and stuttering on HDD's when recording with high quality settings.

I notice no performance difference between ShadowPlay and AB w/NVENC plugin, only that the AB video output file stutters less. They both still suffer from the SLI performance bug when recording that's been in Nvidia's drivers since November 2013. Seriously, it's pretty annoying that in the exact same spot in the exact same game where I only lose 3-5 FPS when recording with single GPU, I lose 15-20 FPS when recording with SLI. But R343 will finally have this bug fixed, or so Nvidia says, so I can't wait for the new drivers. Has pretty much put me off from recording on my laptop this entire year.

 

OK, I was wrong. When ShadowPlay first came out I found it to do a better job (less hit on performance). That has change and Afterburner stepped up its game since then. I had not investigated it since ShadowPlay came out.

Here is the testing I did today... the numbers don't lie. So, now I'm going to nix the GFE because the only reason I even allowed it to exist on my system was for ShadowPlay. Now I don't need it. I will use Precision X for overclocking and Afterburner for recording, just like I used to. Bye, bye GFE. Thanks to Brother octiceps for peaking my curiosity.

Spoiler

Here's a new video... used Afterburner this time...

<iframe width='1280' height="720" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/n5sHEGzfpMg?rel=0" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Hmmm this doesn't look right. No FPS hit with Afterburrner in MJPG and NV12?! That's pretty unbelievable, especially since it's all CPU and you're not even utilizing the hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding of Quick Sync/NVENC/VCE. I don't have the option for NV12, but it looks like uncompressed (or very low compression ratio) going by the massive file size, so I'm even more impressed. Did you try NVENC yet? That would be the ShadowPlay equivalent in Afterburner. It's under external plugins.

BTW the massive FPS drop you're getting with ShadowPlay is par for the course for SLI. Like I said, it's a widely documented and unresolved bug in Nvidia's drivers since November 2013. Almost no performance impact in single GPU, but once you record in SLI, frame rate plunges like crazy. It's the same in Afterburner w/NVENC plugin since it works in fundamentally the same way as ShadowPlay. So maybe you should stick to your amazingly fast CPU encoding.

Spoiler

 

Yes, I tried the NVENC plugin and the FPS results were more or less identical to the ShadowPlay results. But, trouble is, using that plugin I have exactly the same problem as trying to use OBS. The game recording is a black screen for some reason. So, I can't use it for game capture even if I wanted to. I don't know if it is something goofed up with my Windows 7 installation, the latest driver or what. I may try it under Windows 8.1. If that works, then I may try a clean Windows 7 install to see if that changes anything.

I am amazed at how little difference there is in my FPS during capture as well. But, as you can see from that video I posted, it's amazing. Not sure what they did with MSI Afterburner to change this, because it used to be worse than ShadowPlay... a little better than FRAPS, but not as good as ShadowPlay. Don't get me wrong... really happy about it, just very surprised and wish I knew what they did to make it work so well. In fact, I was so surprised that I completed a second round of testing, ran five more benchmarks as a control point just to be sure I was not imagining things. The results were basically identical when I repeated the benchmarks a second time.

And yes, ShadowPlay causes an immediate performance hit from the very moment you flip on software toggle switch. It does not bog down during capture, but it causes the FPS to drop by virtue of being activated without even capturing the video.

I deleted some of the files already, but here is a screen shot of what I have not deleted from my test folder...

 

I only get the black videos if I record with SLI disabled. Is CUDA enabled for both GPU's in Nvidia Control Panel? Can you run and pass the NVENC benchmark in Afterburner? It's most likely a bug in the latest Nvidia drivers, not the OS. I only upgrade my driver every few months so I've been on 337.88 for a while now and it works fine. The latest drivers seem to have broken NVENC in third-party applications. It'll be fixed in the R343 branch along with the SLI recording performance bug, dropping support for legacy DX10 cards, and further DX11 optimizations. Can't wait for it.

Your performance while recording with AB really is amazing, never seen anything like it. It's a 20-25% hit for me, similar to bugged NVENC/ShadowPlay in SLI but slower than single GPU. FRAPS is super-nice quality but the FPS drop is monstrous, 50% or more, as are the file sizes.

Yeah ShadowPlay causes performance loss from the moment it's flipped on if shadow mode is enabled since it is constantly recording.

 

I can't even get shadowplay to work lol. MSI afterburner all the way so long as my system doesn't run out of power haha

 

No, the NVENC benchmark does not work. Yes, Cuda is enabled for both GPUs.

 

ShadowPlay doesn't work on AMD cards. How is VCE in Afterburner working for you? What are your benchmark scores?

It's a driver bug. I'm guessing it throws an error popup?

 

I have 680m at stock 760mhz (slv7) it runs much more smoothly than 7970m stock. No question it is a better card!

 

Nice so you can use ShadowPlay and NVENC now. Although 7970M--->680M is a puzzling sidegrade unless you plan on overclocking quite a bit.

 

The GTX 680M with a stock vBIOS is more or less a performance sidegrade, but with an unlocked vBIOS is much more of a beast for gaming and overclocking... its performance potential skunks the 7970M and as King noted, it's just an all-around smoother operating GPU even without any kind of overclocking.

Yup... this one...

 

Indeed as fox says! Plus the upgrade doesn't cost a penny as I got the 680m so cheap.


I do intend to push this thing to the limit and break some records with 920xm/680m combination.

Do you guys know how far the VRAM goes on the 680m? 900mhz is pretty sad! Mine has Hynix chips if this means anything.

 

Hmmm still not really wrapping my head around the whole "stock performance is the same but it's much smoother" unless he was having driver problems. It's not like we'e comparing SLI vs. CrossFire LOL. If anything, I've had more niggling driver issues with Nvidia than AMD the last few years, only thing I absolutely detest about CCC is the massive bloat.

 

I had no driver problems. I am simply comparing the two cards to each other in games in my machine. The 680m performs better simple as that. One thing I really noticed especially is how the 680m fills textures in instantly when you turn around in a fps. The 7970m despite playing well seemed to lag in this respect. So yes the 680m is playing more smoothly.

 

Factor in overclocking potential when I need it and it is a decent upgrade for me.

 

You're talking about texture pop-in W:TNO and it's improved on the Nvidia card because of GPU Transcoding in CUDA. Can't imagine big differences in benchmarks and game FPS though.

Can I say the 7970M is smoother due to Mantle in BF4 and Thief?

LOL I don't consider any mobile card to be a decent upgrade over a 7970M or 680M yet since I'd be pushing it to its limits anyway and they all have around the same limits.

 

Ok man! I knew exactly where my 7970m reached its limits and it wasn't exactly impressive. 950 on core.

The 680m will have greater longevity plus the fact the 680m I have is barely a year old vs 2.5 years on the 7970m. Considering I don't loose any money it is a great upgrade.

 

Well good luck with your 680M overclocking. Don't kill it before Maxwell arrives!

 

I will try not to. I haven't had a NVidia card to play with since the 8600M GT haha. Now that thing sucked!

 

Indeed, that entire generation sucked due to all the defective cards. I've still got a few Bumpgate casualties lying around.

 

My 680m is a workhorse, good luck!

 

+1 for this

 

would like to see how dead rising 3 plays on the alienware 17

 

Oh yea I am going to play this game so much. I love the series but was not willing to buy an Xbox one just to play it.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

"This game will unlock in approximately 20 hours" so you may have to wait a bit.

Why would you need to buy an XBox One to play it? Save 10% on Dead Rising 3 Apocalypse Edition on Steam

 

just looking for a decent gameplay sample.

i also see that ryse: son of rome is coming to pc as well so i hope someone does a vid too!

 

Dead Rising 3 has apparently been locked to 30fps in the same way N4Speed Rivals (?) was. The only way to get 60fps is by a doubling of speed. I'm really annoyed about this. 30 fps is unplayable.

 

Ditto, especially in SLI due to microstuttering. They can keep their console port trash. Same goes for Ryse, or shall I say Crytek's Fall. :laugh:

 

Have Crytek gone and done the same dumb thing have they? Or you mean the game just sucks lemons?

 

No the game just sucks balls. It looks really nice though. Crytek still has the visual chops but it's completely forgotten how to make a good game. Where once there was Far Cry and Crysis, now there's Ryse and Warface. How far the fruit has fallen from the tree.

 

Oh, that's just so mean. How could you say such a thing? Those folks need to feel like a big boy, too. If everyone gets the same humbling frame rate nobody will have to feel bad about their pathetic little micro-machines that are just barely able to maintain 30 FPS. It would be so wrong for developers to release games that are too demanding for those kids be able to enjoy them. And, it's just not fair that people who spend more money on better hardware are allowed to enjoy such a rich and rewarding experience. Not fair, not fair, not fair.

Give me back the awesome games that drive real enthusiasts to a place of perpetual discontent, always wanting more than the best hardware is capable of delivering. :thumbsup:

 

I've read a few testaments of people getting 60fps with Dead Rising 3 on PC. I'd like to know for sure.

 

Metro Last Light Redux: 88.89 avg FPS
Metro 2033 Redux: 74.37 avg FPS
Maximum Video Quality Settings
CPU @ 4.3GHz and GPUs at 1006/1500

<iframe width='853' height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BTBdsvNKaFY?rel=0" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

what's the difference between the original and redux? more optimized versions?

 

Better graphics, much better optimization, gameplay tweaks, and inclusion of all DLC.

 

last light doesn't look any different but metro 2033 redux looks more in line with last light so i might pick it up again if it runs better than the original cos that ran like a dog!

 

LL Redux also has huge performance improvements at the highest settings as the tireless Mr. Fox has demonstrated in his benchmarks, so I'll be getting both Redux titles even though I already own the originals.

 

Yeah, I think both Redux titles are big improvements. Both are still pretty demanding, but much smoother. "Optimized" is a good way to describe it.

Have a look at the graphs I posted here (and other posts in the same thread): http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ux-performance-discussion-15.html#post9766929

 

still waiting for someone to post DR3 vids

 

You first.

 

not buying because i am not convinced.

 

Well there you have it. We're all smart people here, so you're probably not gonna see any Dead Rising 3 videos until the game is fixed to a playable state.

 

LOLz i'm sure there's someone on the interwebs that has taken the damage....

when ryse comes out i'll take the damage then cos it was an ok fun experience.

EDIT: I guess i don't need to cos totalbiscuit has done a video on the state of the pc port.

 

For those that seldom visit the M18x/18 sub-forum, this may be of interest regarding Metro Redux... this video provides a nice run-down on the changes.

 

Err...



Total Biscuit needs to quit his whining and start learning how to use SLI compatibility bits



Game takes a hit recording with Shadowplay, otherwise I'm usually v-syncing at about 60fps with the odd dodgy frame rate hike to 45.

 

Cool... looked like some of them were break-dancing, LOL.
Clicked the YouTube "like" (thumbs up) for you.