My son is trying to record some game footage on his pc but it's running like a dog. He's trying to record Forza 4 for just a few minutes. He has an I5 6600k, 16gb, ram and a 1060 6gb. Should this be enough? He's playing at 1080p.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/i5-6600k-recording.3398663/ https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/game-streaming-encoding-coffee-lake-ryzen,5326-3.html Looks like it's not going to cut the mustard - in that test they try a 7600K and find it to be no good for streaming (presumably recording also). It would appear that only having 4 threads is the main issue.
You will probably want to use a dedicated capture card/box from the likes of avermedia, elgato etc, on such low end hardware, well really on any hardware if you don't want to impact frames. No doubt there will be some cheap chinese capture device on Amazon/Ebay that will do similar.
That's probably the best option tbh. Most sites seem to suggest a 6c/12t or 8c/16t cpu nowadays for streaming (and presumably recording idk) - by the looks of things, the 'cheapest' way you could sort this would be something like a 8700K but even that'd take a ~50% hit in framerates looking at this:
I guess we should ask the question what is he using to record footage, just in case he is doing it in hardcore software way as Nvidia has some stuff in the geforce experience to capture footage, it may be useful, never used it so can't say.
If you install OBS and use the GPU to do the recording, you loose between 10% to 30% performance but it depends on the settings you record at, and it's a better option than the stuff that nVidia includes with Geforce Experience, because it's not limited and not restricted for the audio. When I was using OBS on the same machine as playing games, I was using a better GPU and had a better CPU but still I could record 1080p and even stream 1080p content at the same time as playing, the main issue is going to be trying to do to much at to high a quality for such spec's. If you install OBS, try recording the gameplay at these settings and see how it goes: Resolution: 1080p Audio Sample Rate: 48Khz Audio Bitrate: 192 on all 3 tracks Recording Format: MKV Audio Tracks: 3 (tick the box for 1,2 and 3 will explain later why) Encoder: nVidia NVENC H.264 (new) Rate Control: CBR Bitrate: Try between 10,000Kbps and 25,000Kbps Preset: Quality Profile:High You can tweak the settings to get the video to look good, without impacting to much. The reason for 3 audio tracks is because if you go in to the "Advanced Audio Properties" you can set the Microphone to a seperate track, Game Sound to a seperate track and then have 1 that has all combined, it means that if he wants to edit the video to upload to YouTube then he will be able to adjust the audio of each item. The downside to recording on the same machine though is that if he uses the likes of Discord or Teamspeak then the audio from that will be recorded as well and it cannot be removed if Discord etc is used on the same pc. If recording is to much, then try the same settings but drop the Video Bitrate to between 4500Kbps and 8000Kbps and he could stream the gameplay to YouTube or Twitch and then pull the recording to edit but it won't be as good as a raw recording, and the Bitrate will depend on your Internet upload speed.
Seeing that you've got an Nvidia card, use shadow play. If I can record/stream fine with shadow play on my laptop then the 1060 should hopefully be good enough as well. Not too sure about that CPU but I believe shadow play uses nvenc gpu encoding.
