Question / Help What CPU can comfortably record in x264 medium preset?

I'd probably recommend at least a CPU with eight physical cores or more. The more cores the better generally.
 
It would be for recording gameplay. 3440x1440@60fps.

Boilddown, I had no idea it was possible to use a second PC to record. But I think it's too much to have another PC.

I figured if the CPU has 50% available, it would be more then enough headroom for games.

So Jim, you an CPU with eight physical cores. Does that mean that absolutely any CPU with eight physical cores will do? Are some better then other when it comes to x264 medium recording? (ie, do the intel chips perform better then amd?).
 
You're not going to be able to encode x264 at that resolution and framerate and still have 50% left over for games at medium preset, unless you get a server CPU that's shitty for gaming. And to even achieve that you will pay out the nose far more than the cost of a second PC and capture card capable of handling that resolution.

You'd be better off trying to use NVEnc running a high bitrate with a normal gaming CPU. If you're not streaming, just recording, insisting on Medium preset is completely insane.
 
Astralogic said:
It would be for recording gameplay. 3440x1440@60fps.

Boilddown, I had no idea it was possible to use a second PC to record. But I think it's too much to have another PC.

I figured if the CPU has 50% available, it would be more then enough headroom for games.

So Jim, you an CPU with eight physical cores. Does that mean that absolutely any CPU with eight physical cores will do? Are some better then other when it comes to x264 medium recording? (ie, do the intel chips perform better then amd?).
Click to expand...

More like every newer 8 Core CPU going with Broadwell-E CPUs or AMD Ryzen 7 possibly the new Skylake-X as well but Intel is by far more expensive here and as already stated your resolution with 60 frames and medium Preset is quite the load.
 
I see what you're saying.

I have a i7 4770 and a GTX 1080. Would you recommend nvenc for 3440x1440@60fps over x264 for my setup?
 
Astralogic said:
I see what you're saying.

I have a i7 4770 and a GTX 1080. Would you recommend nvenc for 3440x1440@60fps over x264 for my setup?
Click to expand...

I've never personally tried anything over 1920x1080p60 yet, but yes. At the very least try it out and see how it works.
 
Let's clarify.

For the question, for a tweaked/optimized medium x264 you would need a recent 8-core CPU ... and that would be for a dedicated / second streaming PC ; and you would typically use more than 50% of it, more like around 80% : the more you can to improve the quality of the encoding (tweaking the number of look-ahead frames).

But the question is wrong. x264 medium is to get the better quality in a low bitrate stream: it's using the best encoder with the more h264 options you can to get the best picture in a low bitrate for twitch or the like.

Sure nvenc or quicksync can't do all those x264 options.

But for a local recording you simply don't need that: the x264 heavy computations are here to get the low bitrate. For a local recording you simply don't have that constraint. You just do the local recording with nvenc, or x264 superfast, or even quicksync, but with a "huge" bitrate like 100mbps, and you get a top quality local recording without using much cpu -- trading computations with just temporary disk usage. And that will be reduced down once you do your edit final export.

So yep, just record with nvenc, like with geforce experience and a hotkey assigned to start/stop the recording -- use the scroll key, you even have the scroll key led to tell you it's actually recording. xD

For streaming ... try nvenc too. And if you really want x264 medium (for streaming): second / dedicated pc then.

For the 8-core CPU, today that would be a Ryzen 7 3700X, or a i7-9700k : would be perfect, and not getting too hot / not too noisy.
 
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