Recording PC gameplay in 1080p

Turns out the problem was my hard drives after all. Bottlenecking was a major issue, despite being 7200RPM and SATA 3Gb/s which I amount to being a fairly good system.

After investigating Dxtory further, I found that using the RawCap file format allows the program to record the file over multiple hard drives, and comes with software to combine them all into a single AVI file which would then need to be rendered.

As proof, I did a Path of Exile recording test while in windowed fullscreen. 1080p was no problem at all.

Yeah, it is probably the hard drive.

You can calculate the bandwidth required for raw RGB recording as follows:

Truecolor 24 bits = 3 bytes per pixel.

Size of one RGB image: Width x Height x 3 bytes. So, at 1080p:

(1920 x 1080 x 3 bytes) = 6,220,800 bytes

Recording at 30 fps: x 30 = 186,624,000 bytes per second of recording

which is / 1048576 ~ = 178 MB/s

Compression taken into account (about 50% bandwidth gain, assuming YUV 4:2:2 format) you would need at least a harddrive which can write at 90 MB / s without breaking a sweat.

Double that for 60 fps recording, which leaves you not much of an alternative other than RAID or SSD.