Help wanted for testing motion blur for future FM episodes

[Ross Scott]

Hey everyone, I wanted to see if people were willing to help me do some benchmark tests. As it's been mentioned since my last video, the program "srcdemo2" is a game changer in terms of motion blur. It has pros and cons compared to my method, but unloads a lot of the work onto the CPU instead of the hard drive. If you're interested in helping me out, here's what you need:

 

1. srcdemo2 installed (requires Java + Dokan library)

2. A faster CPU than mine (Phenom II X4 955)

3. A copy of Half-Life 2

4. Ability to follow directions (if you have any experience recording demos or using console commands on the source engine, that's a big plus).

 

Anyway, give me a reply here and I can provide some instructions later. If you can test out srcdemo2 and get it working yourself, that will save a lot of time.

[Otto]

Yey, yep, I'm definitely willing to help out but I'll need to wait a while before I have time to get SrcDemo 2 installed.

My CPU is ranked double your Phenom performance according to the PassMark statistics and I'm quite experienced with

Source demos, Demo Smoother and general console commands. I'll post back later when I'm ready, but I may be late.

[VeryShyPerson]

I got weird results when i tried out SrcDemo2. The animations were extremely jittery in several different games. I still got it installed though. My computer isn't got the fastest CPU, sadly. But I recorded about 15-20 demos before (nothing real fancy like demo smoother though) and can use console command and Im willing to help.

 

Edit: Well, I did have some videos after all! Here's my first test, where I used a gazillion frames per frame (I'm an idiot and misunderstood things) and it took nine hours to render:

 

lP2yjGbQJyo

 

Here's the second one, at a more reasonable amount of frames, but with severe glitchiness.

 

qtSiFbM8SWo

 

I had a few more...mostly with the results of the second. They've since gone to the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky or I'd upload them.

 

ANOTHER EDIT: Here's a third video Id sent to a friend and my friend was able to dig up and send back to me.

This was recorded in Black Mesa Source. Yes I know I'm not playing that well. I usually do a little better.

Normal Source Recorder (host_framerate 30):

 

Li0vkm797QA

 

SrcDemo2 Output:

 

eZgKu3slKUc

 

 

I can't remember how long it took the videos to render so I cant help you there im sorry.

I dont know if I'm helping by posting those videos but i hope i am.

[Ross Scott]

Well here's the test to anyone who's interested:

 

1. Get SrcDemo2 working, and point it to an empty directory inside your Half-Life 2 folder. I'm using "blurtest"

2. Download demos I made here and add them to your HL2 directory.

3. Set your video settings to 1280x720 and turn off vsync. I don't THINK the other in-game video settings matter because the CPU will be the bottleneck. To be safe however, I suggest putting all the settings to the default. I would turn off AA and "motion blur" especially.

4. Have your settings for srcdemo2 match mine exactly (besides picking your own directories):

Yes, I really want the framerate that high

5. Click "activate" then launch HL2 (don't forget to use an EMPTY subdirectory)

6. Type the following:

host_framerate 1920

startmovie blurtest\nameofmovie

playdemo short

7. After the demo is over, type "endmovie" (no quotes)

8. Go to the directory where you told scrdemo2 to output the image sequence. Look at the properties of the time the first frame was created and the last frame and calculate the difference. This is how long it took to process the demo.

8. Post your time and CPU specs here or else email me.

 

Doing this may take your computer hostage and alt-tabbing will screw it up. This may NOT occur in windowed mode however, not certain. If you feel ambitious you can provide additional benchmarks:

 

1. Try out the "long" demo (about a minute in length realtime)

2. Try the same demos at 1920x1080 resolution instead.

 

Thanks a bunch to anyone who tries this.

[VeryShyPerson]

Multitasking is possible with window mode at least mine.

 

And also for a general warning make sure you're not in the subfolder when you hit activate. Sometimes it can make the Dokan drivers glitch up and it'll not transfer the frames to the program. It happened to me once. See that the little shortcut arrow appears on the folder.

Edited March 19, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[VeryShyPerson]

short.dem

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+

I have about 4 GB of RAM on a 32-bit system.

Frame 000001: 21:18

Frame 000314: 22:09

Total Time: about 51 minutes?

The CPU never ran at full, about 86% usually.

 

If nobody else does and I don't get hospitalized tonight* I'll probably do the long one tomorrow.

 

*this is semi-joking but i came down with a very severe headache (it's better now). because of my accident its a little worrisome.

 

If i forgot to add anything important im sorry.

[TheVGR]

I can't seem to get it to play the demo. IT may be because I just re installed source and this error pops up every single time I attempt to run a demo.

 

COM_CheckGameDirectory: game directories don't match (hl1 / hl2)

[VeryShyPerson]

What I'd do is verify game cache and if that doesnt work maybe try opt into the beta.

[BTGBullseye]

I can't seem to get it to play the demo. IT may be because I just re installed source and this error pops up every single time I attempt to run a demo.

 

COM_CheckGameDirectory: game directories don't match (hl1 / hl2)

Did you have any mods for any source engine games installed before? If so you might have two separate directories for HL2 like I do... Check and see if you have one in the common folder, and use that one...

[Ross Scott]

Yeah for the record, this is a totally vanilla copy of HL2 I was using, I only installed it again about a week ago.

[BTGBullseye]

Took 22 minutes on mine... I had everything set to maximum quality at that resolution, and left AA and blur on... Total = 314 frames.

 

I'll give the long one a try shortly...

 

According to several real-world tests I've seen and heard of, lower benchmarking Intels still beat higher benchmarking AMDs... (unless you're talking the absolute newest processors from AMD, which are almost on par with Intel)

 

Complete system specs: Windows 7 Ultimate x64, Intel i5-3210m CPU, 8GB of 1600MHz RAM 9-9-9-24 timing, Nvidia GeForce GT 630m GPU (the 96 cores version) with 2GB DDR3 VRAM, a 500GB 7200RPM Seagate internal HDD, and a 2TB external Seagate HDD in a USB3 enclosure.

[blacktronics]

I'll try this with my Phenom II X6 1090T in a second, it's currently enslaved.

 

Makes me wonder whether there is a way to load up a demo file in Cinema/Blender/Max and render it from there, would allow for some interesting stuff.Imagine bumpmapping, tesselation, reflection, refraction etc in HL1

Modify and adjust scenes after recording them, multiple camera angles, "Dynamic" lighting and GPU Rendering.

 

 

Edit: The short one took 29 minutes.

 

What I find interesting is that the CPU constantly was around 25%

I will try this at 1080p now

 

Edit2:

 

1080p took 36 minutes.

CPU was around 35%

 

Both tests were performed in windowed mode, I was doing other stuff while performing these tests.

I also noticed that when I had the HL2 window focused the FPS went from around 8-12 to 14-18

[Vitor]

i5 4570.

 

Frame001 - 11:53

Frame314 - 12:00

 

 

Short Demo

 

 

Frames per Second according to scrdemo2, 44,64.

[VeryShyPerson]

Well since other people are doing the long demo I'll save my processing cycles but I might as well post a few more of my (hopefully relevant) specifications.

 

 

Computer: FOXCONN MCP61M05

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Brisbane, BH-G2)

2200 MHz (11.00x200.0) @ 1808 MHz (9.00x200.9)

Motherboard: FOXCONN M61PMV

Chipset: nVidia nForce 6100-405/430

Memory: 4096 MBytes @ 301 MHz, 5.0-5-5-15

- 2048 MB PC5300 DDR2-SDRAM - Kingston 2G-UDIMM

- 2048 MB PC5300 DDR2-SDRAM - Kingston 2G-UDIMM

Graphics: XFX GeForce 8400 GS

NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS, 512 MB DDR2 SDRAM

OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Build 6002

 

 

My computer isnt the newest or most powerful around but I take good care of it.

[BTGBullseye]

Ok, on the long demo it took exactly 1 hour and 45 minutes.

[Ross Scott]

Well I just tested it myself, it came to 8 minutes 15 seconds on my system. I may try the others later.

 

The short one took 29 minutes.

I don't get it, that's much longer than my time, but your CPU should be a little faster than mine. Vsync was off and srcdemo2 was operating?

 

Graphics: XFX GeForce 8400 GS

This COULD be limiting things actually. I remember using this as a backup card when my 8800 GTS died and man, it ran some things extremely slow.

[VeryShyPerson]

I have to bump down the graphics settings on some newer games. I got my computer in 2009. Aside from adding the second extra hard drive (and replacing the cooling fans) the hardware configurations never changed much.

[BTGBullseye]

The time delay isn't in the CPU, but in the GPU because of rendering the frames... From what I see, it completely removes the time it would take you to add motion blur, if you were recording at the same framerate.

[Ross Scott]

The time delay isn't in the CPU, but in the GPU because of rendering the frames... From what I see, it completely removes the time it would take you to add motion blur, if you were recording at the same framerate.

I think that would only be true if the GPU couldn't keep up with the rate they were being recorded at, which isn't the case. So if the GPU is rendering at sub-64 fps, then yeah, the GPU is the bottleneck. Otherwise it doesn't "remove" it so much as it combines it all in one process. Here's how I see it:

 

Step 1: Rendering the frames (this will cause things to be in slow motion, but in every recording I've ever done, this is ALWAYS faster than RECORDING the frames. You can tell by noticing the speedup when you bring up the console during recording, which halts recording)

 

Step 2: Recording the frames (regular HL2 takes up a LOT of space doing this, that's where the hard drive bottleneck came in using my method. SrcDemo2 keeps this in memory, then

 

Step 3: Process the motion blur, then record it to disk. Srcdemo2 does the motion blur processing on the frames right in memeory, recording to the drive at a fraction of the rate that my 180fps method does. I believe the motion blur processing is a single-threaded CPU-dependent process. Since it does the blur right there, like you said, this puts the bottleneck on the CPU instead of the GPU.

 

 

You are right in that if the GPU can't stay ahead of the number of frames needed to process by the CPU, then BOTH become the bottleneck, but in this case, as long as the GPU can render 64 frames faster than it takes to condense 64 frames into one for motion blur, the CPU is still the bottleneck.

 

Tell you what, I'll do a test later to get some hard data. I'll do one at higher quality settings (SGSSAA always takes a bite out of speed), but make sure it's still rendering ABOVE 64fps average (when not recording), then another one where I minimize EVERYTHING and see if there's any time difference between the two. If there is, I'm missing something, if not, it's as I said above.

[VeryShyPerson]

I should also note that there was a lot less memory usage than i expected. Surprising to me really because of how SrcDemo2 works.