Quality Test - MSI Afterburner's MJPEG Implementation (Part I) with Hitman: Absolution (Ultra Settings, 1080p)

Update: Added screenshot example of the RTV1 codec 'color banding' issue, with circled areas¹**
Update: Added Quality Test Comparison (Four 1080p samples of Hitman:Absolution) at different Quality Settings²**

Recording with the MJPEG (Motion JPEG) codec, every frame is an independent 'Keyframe 'or 'I-Frame' (short for "Information Frame"), which means it is a type of frame that can be 'cut' or started from in video editing programs (technically, every frame is a JPG picture!). This also allows for faster seeking and rendering in editing applications. MJPEG also requires less overhead (better performance/less 'lag' while recording) than many codecs. As well, the audio captured is PCM ("Uncompressed") with MSI's Afterburner, which means that any video editor should be able to recognize the sound data. Errors in programs like Virtualdub saying "Error initializing audio stream decompression" or Sony's Vegas showing "Stream attributes could not be determined" will not occur and these will open the audio without associated problems.

Testing out MSI's Afterburner as a game recorder and using the built-in MJPEG codec that comes with the program, I fired up some Hitman: Absolution, turned up everything to Ultra, captured some clips and put them together, uploaded it to YouTube, and collected some results with everyone:

This video compilation is a test of a few things:
1) Hitman: Absolution's performance while maxed out (Ultra Settings in game Options)
2) Capture quality of MSI Afterburner and performance/lag of using it
3) H.264/AVC compression quality maintainability
4) Youtube's quality maintainability

Recorded with:
MSI Afterburner
- v.2.3.0
- MJPEG codec, "Full Frame", 80% quality, 30fps
- Audio automatically records into PCM ("Uncompressed") format

Recorded Game: 
Hitman: Absolution @ 1920x1080 (1080p)
- "Ultra" settings (Preset)
- Anisotropic Filtering set to 4xAA
- "Texture Filtering Quality" set to High Quality (i.e.Off/NoFiltering) in Control Center

- "Morphological" Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) setting (AMD/ATi) set to ON
- "Surface Format Optimization" set to OFF in Control Center (AMD/ATi)

Framerate while not recording: ~31-79fps
Framerate while recording: ~28-64fps

I chose some Hitman: Absolution clips for a Quality Test because it was a good example of a recent game (at the time of this writing) that includes both fast movement/action areas on the screen, as well as slow/non-moving parts, including text. It has lots of dark and light areas, high contrast edges, particles (rain/filmgrain/sparks,etc) and tests area panning as well.

I was impressed with MSI Afterburner and it's utilization of the MJPEG codec overall. It seems to be slightly optimized or tweaked somewhat. At 80% Quality (to be in the realm of comparison with Bandicam's MJPEG Preset Default of 'Quality80'), flatter/darker parts were not overly compressed - which would create excessive macroblocking and/or be too smoothed out, normally. This could be partially due to the 'Film Grain' effect within the game, however (seen mainly when the sky or a flat-coloured background is in view).
In other words, there was very little Gibbs Effects aka 'Ringing' ("mosquito noise") around elements such as text when onscreen, and what effects were there, were 'hidden' somewhat by the grain effect. You had to look closely to see it, which is still pretty good for not recording in a 100% Quality setting - but again, the 'Film Grain' effect in this game is contributing to this 'negative effect of the MJPEG codec' not being as visible.

A small amount of Gibbs Effects/Mosquito Noise/Ringing can be seen around and within the UPC symbol  from this frame taken out of the original MJPEG recording. It is about as visible and even seems to be less so in the video itself, due to the "Film Grain" effect present in the game helping to hide it. Click to see Full Size

The very small amount of color banding present in the original recording was somewhat generated by the Game Engine and there is very little of it (what does occur is hidden somewhat with the film grain effect the game has).
In the recorded output, thankfully there is very little, partially because of a higher-quality setting when used and how MJPEG codec handles color dithering; color banding usually won't be seen very much at higher bitrate/quality settings (which means low compression), but will be easily seen at lower bitrate/quality settings (which uses higher compression).
Keeping above 80% quality when recording with the MJPEG codec [I recommend recording at 90% if your system can handle it, as most games do not have the Film Grain effect present in Absolution to help hide compression artifacts, such as color banding, flat color/area macroblocks and Gibbs Effects] if you have the space, it should leave you satisfied with easily-editable captures.

²**Quality Test Comparison - Four examples of various Quality Settings (90%, 70%, 50% and 30%) when using MSI Afterburner's MJPEG Codec in Hitman: Absolution. The differences are most apparent in the middle section, the bricks that the police officer is standing on, and the people milling around to the left of the gazebo, both areas showing colour loss (Posterization) and detail loss (Quantization), more obvious in the 30% sample (bottom). All sources were original output frame extractions from 1080p recordings.
Click to see Full size

[A quick note here that MSI Afterburner's output/recording seems to be somewhat darker than other game recording programs. It even states this in it's own Options, "captured video may appear darker than you see it while gaming" and offers a checkbox that will apply Gamma Correction. Since this article is more about MSI's MJPEG optimization and utilization (performance and ability to maintain visible quality), this 'darker recording' will be explored further in a future Game Recorder Comparison article]

For people trying out any game recording software and finding your recordings are choppy/laggy on playback (that is, when you are looking at the generated/recorded file), you should find that if you use a player/viewer that has Acceleration (GPU, videocard, DirectX processing), it should play back much more smoothly. If your system does not have this option, you can also try converting what is captured to another file temporarily, one with a smaller bitrate/size, and you should then find it will play back that converted file just fine (especially when recording with lossless/high-bitrate codecs).


...

It was interesting to do some side recording with Afterburner's included RTV1 codec as well*
The Riva Tuner Video codec is an iteration related to older codecs such as Indeo Video and S3TC compression techniques. It is similar to MJPEG and it seems to have very little effect on performance while recording - even performing slightly better than MJPEG at times, which was a nice surprise. Unfortunately, it suffers from 'color banding' (Color Quantization/Posterization) and the result is apparent lower quality, even at high bitrate/quality settings. Although it may not be as obvious in the below comparisons (depending on the settings of your monitor/colors/brightness), and while it certainly does not 'destroy the quality overall' in the game recording, in the captured video the color banding can be very distracting, especially when it includes motion through the color and light changes in an area as you move through it [it may not be to everyone, of course]. The size of the file produced is quite a bit larger than when recording with the MJPEG codec as well, but more on that in a future article..

*As this article is mainly a Test of Afterburner's usage of the MJPEG codec, a future Game Recorder Comparison article will include the RTV1 codec found in MSI's Afterburner and cover it in more detail than here

¹**An example of the RTV1 codec's problem with Color Quantization ('color banding'). This frame is extracted directly from a 100% Quality RTV1 codec recording (Batman: Arkham City Benchmark @ 1080p). The areas that contain the most obvious color banding problem have been highlighted with green circles.

If you are having problems with Color Banding that is not in the game itself, try to use a higher-bitrate setting (higher quality) for the codec you are recording with, resulting in lower compression and lowered loss of details, if you can do so.
[With the RTV1 codec, it appears that it will still remain a little, no matter what...]

...


Getting back to MJPEG testing with Afterburner, framerate was maintained close to non-recording performance (at ~30-60+fps for this game) when recording. I usually used MSI's Afterburner only as a monitor/controller for the videocards installed and captured with another program such as FRAPS or Bandicam. Using MSI Afterburner alone and having to run one less application in the background to capture no doubt had at least some sort of streamlining affect on performance. It felt that way, slightly.

Clear, crisp textures can be seen in this frame taken from the original MJPEG capture.
MSI's Afterburner and it's utilization of the MJPEG codec seems to be even slightly superior to Bandicam's implementation of it. [Hmm..something that must soon be tested!]
Click to see Full Size

The Average bitrate of the original MJPEG captures was about 30Mbps up to 70Mbps, which meant a writing stream to the disk of up to 8MB/s, which almost any hard drive can handle (recorded onto a drive capable of 150MB/s at the time).
The original generated recording files were about twice the bitrate and size of the final MPEG-4 compressed file uploaded to YouTube, the final file weighing in at about 600MB with a bitstream of 25Mbps on average (it is assumed that almost everyone will compress recorded material into a final output video compilation file of 8-20Mbps or so, for uploading to YouTube/Vimeo/etc (Blu-Ray's standard bitrate is 36Mbps and most video editing application presets go up to 20Mbps by default).
This final utilized bitrate, with the efficiency of H.264/AVC, manages to keep most of the detail that was in the original MJPEG recordings, although sadly, most of the finer detail is lost after uploading, as can be seen in the screenshot comparison below:

Originally used in an earlier article testing out MJPEG on Diablo3 with Bandicam, this screenshot shows examples of the detail loss after uploading to YouTube, when the video is played back at 1080p and 720p. Click to see Full Size 

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What was more disappointing was that YouTube feels the need to overly re-compress uploads. Much of the quality is lost, especially things like the film grain, one of the 'first things to go' in temporal video recompression. For instance, at 1:03-1:08 there is visible grain effect maintained in the settings I chose for the final compressed output file, keeping most of the grain from the original MJPEG recording from Afterburner. In the YouTube Video Player after uploading, it can be seen that much of that grain is lost. Another example of this is the dense cornfield against the much flatter sky textures at 1:30-1:36. I kept the complexity of the cornstalks and hard contrasts of the plant details versus the sky on purpose, yet after YouTube's recompressing of the video, the result is blurred and smoothed details that were not like that in the recorded MJPEG video or the final H.264/AVC high-quality video output/final compress. I will attempt other uploads of the data at various settings for experimentation and put it just below this paragraph when an upload does not lose much of the finer details I wish to share**. I understand they must do it to save space (no doubt people upload huge, 'FRAPS-original' size files and recordings sometimes), it is merely unfortunate. At least it then becomes an example of what happens to some of the quality and detail once uploaded to YouTube (the extracted frame above, for example, is from the original MJPEG recording produced by Afterburner). There seems to be no use, at this time, to attempt to upload extremely high quality/fine detail. 

 The file originally uploaded to YouTube, the results of the MSI/MJPEG Quality Test, was previously compressed with a bitrate of 25Mbps. While this bitrate, using high-quality H.264/AVC codec settings, was enough to maintain details such as Film Grain and high contrast edges, much of this detail was lost after YouTube recompressed the uploaded file. 

**Another, higher-bitrate excerpt [in an attempt to compensate for YouTube's recompression] of the original MSI/MJPEG video capture:

This video then, is an attempt to compensate for YouTube's recompression and data loss, by uploading a video stream with a very high bitrate (an average of 60Mbps, up to 80Mbps, higher even than the original recorded data). As such, the duration is much smaller, a mere excerpt of the original intended upload.

Result: Even when a video stream is uploaded with the much higher bitrate, even when the original captured file is uploaded, even when I rendered the capture to a 2160p (4K UltraHD) file and uploaded that to YouTube, YouTube's recompression of the uploaded material (while still watchable) loses far too much detail from the actual upload - at least for high-detail evaluation of a game recorder's produced video streams. This is unfortunate. For now then, I will try to always show frames (screenshots) extracted from the original captured files created by game recording applications in Quality Tests...

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Turning up the Recording Quality setting to 100%, the bitrate for MJPEG jumps up to over 275Mbps (over 30MB a second of file size being written to the drive). Quite a jump - and at that bitrate, the size becomes comparable to a YUV codec (or a FRAPS 1080p half-size recording) easily - but the quality ramps up as well. Color dithering and loss of detail is surprisingly near-negligible at 100% Quality with this game, yet the resource demand for using the MJPEG codec [especially MSI's optimization of it] seems to remain small, as MJPEG was already a lightweight codec with somewhat smaller processing being done, to begin with. Today's powerful videocards and CPU's should be capable of pumping out a sequence of lightly compressed JPEG's in a single file [no pun intended] without breaking a sweat. As long as your system isn't chugging along already, adding some MJPEG capturing shouldn't affect it very much. For those of you with slightly older systems with trouble recording in other codecs, give MJPEG a try, it should record smoother for you.

Overall, well done MSI.  /clap

If anyone is looking for a completely free Game Recording program (it might have even come on a disc with your videocard, as mine did) look no further than MSI's Afterburner. Keeping the settings relatively high [especially with the MJPEG codec, to keep compression artifacts low] and/or doing your own tests to see what looks 'good enough' for you, I suspect many people will be happy (if you aren't already) with using Afterburner and the low-resource-demanding and editing-friendly MJPEG codec to record your gaming adventures.



Please note dear reader, that I am not saying "This codec is the best one to record with" or "use this one only". I am merely showing that it is possible, or how to tweak it for quality or file size, as to your own personal tastes. There are many codecs out there to choose from when game recording and although some are more apt for certain types of games than others, overall it is your own choice to do with as you wish - do a few short tests and use what you prefer.


Have fun recording with MSI Afterburner and the MJPEG codec - and See you in the games!

[Note: As noted throughout this article, this testing of MJPEG with Hitman:Absolution alone is not a full test of MJPEG quality maintenance potential, as this game utilizes a "Film Grain" effect, which hides some of MJPEG's weaknesses in maintaining Quality. In a future post (Part II), a more in-depth examination of MJPEG as a video game recording codec, using other games and utilities, will be actualized. See you then!]

Battlefield Play4Free - First Impressions, Graphics Comparison, Tips and Brief Shotgun Gameplay/x264 Test Recording (1080p)

I recently got around to trying the 'Play For Free' version of the Battlefield series and created an account through their website to try this game out.
[I remembered much later that I actually had an account that I used during the Beta phase, but I completely forgot about that - and also what the game was like back then anyway - too much Battlefield 3 cleared all of that from my brain, I suppose!]
It is free to create an Account and play forever if you so desire, but there are also many options for purchasing weapons, armor, clothing, and other items with "Real Money".

The 4 classes available to play in BFP4F, with information on each. Click to see Full Size.

After creating a free account (which is assigned to an e-mail address), I started out playing the Medic class and it seemed to get more fun as it went along. You don't start out with paddles/defibrillators, but you do start out with a healing box that you throw down (as in Battlefield Bad Company 2), a Machine Gun (MG3), pistol (M9), Tracer Darts (a'la BFBC2) and a knife - but no grenades (yet). Running around dropping healing boxes and backing up my team was great and when I unlocked the Defibs, I felt like I was playing BFBC2. After getting used to the Controls (adjusting the sensitivity, changing some of the default hotkeys, etc) in no time it felt like good'ol Battlefield.

A hotel in Battlefield 2 (bottom) and the same hotel in Battlefield Play4Free (top)
Click to see Full Size

The visuals are akin to Battlefield 2, with extra shaders and effects mixed with some BFBC2 elements. For instance, you can 'spot' the enemy and the BFBC2-type 'triangle' appears above their head for a while and they appear on the map. The environment looks more like Battlefield 2 than Battlefield Bad Company 2, with many models (shapes) looking like they were pulled straight from BF2 and just converted. This is not a bad thing particularly, I enjoyed BF2 a lot, and with some shading, fog and other graphical boosts that were done, the game doesn't look too bad - especially when you consider it's a free-to-play title and won't cost you one cent if you don't want to spend it.

Graphics comparison between Low, Medium and High 'Video Quality' settings.
Click to see Full Size

I would have liked more complexity to many things, but it makes sense that they tried to keep the polygon/videocard usage down, supporting more types of machines/older ones, so that more people could play it (and they could also potentially make more money). It does look very playable, especially if you can turn things up a bit, and the gameplay is still The Battlefield Formula, which meant soon I wasn't paying attention to the graphics at all - I was too busy capturing points, driving teammates around, an' killin' an' healin'.. If you like the Battlefield style of gameplay, especially Battlefield2, you should enjoy playing this game.

Unlabeled comparison of that apartment complex that is forever under construction.
Click to see Full Size

The starting guns for the Medic were low accuracy and low damage and you will get killed a lot in direct firefights, but with some practice with short bursts and aiming down the sights, you can still kill others, even at a distance, and slowly start to make points. The starting rifle for the Sniper packs more of a punch of course, but seems to take forever to reload and has bullets that must be made out of solid granite, because they seem so heavy and drop so much. The starting guns for the Engineer was an RPG and [what I found to be,] a decent sub-machine gun (I have always been a fan of the PP-2000 though, I remember fondly running around in Bad Company 2 with Magnum Rounds in one /evillaugh). Recoil is high on these beginning guns, but I assume it gets better later on as more becomes unlocked at higher soldier levels. Grenades don't seem to go straight all the time, in random throws, which makes for some tense-but-funny bounces.

Although the PLAY NOW buttons will get you into the thick of battle very quickly, you cannot choose what game mode to play (Rush, etc). If you want to choose what game type to play or what server to play on, there is a server browser [indicated in the picture above with green arrows] button in the upper-right corner of the Launcher.



I found at the website, after logging in that there was a 'Starter Pack' for each class, a sort of 'preview' of a couple weapons that you can buy, which included a high-damage shotgun in it for my Medic. That was a lot of fun, if you don't mind having to run-and-gun into the frays, but it only lasted one day, then the gun disappears and is no longer usable anymore. Still, it was a nice little preview and I got some fast close-quarter kills with it while it lasted (see Video).

As with most online games that can possibly make money from you, the levels come fast at the beginning to get you hooked, then slow down quite a bit (I found it started to 'feel slow' around Level 6 or 7). You can purchase eXPerience boosters and as you level you can purchase more weapons as they become 'unlocked'. You gain free tokens called Credits as you play the game, but gain them slowly (automatically over time it seems, based on Time Played) and these Credits purchase weapons that [mostly] last one day (or items that have limited numbers of uses, such as healing bandages). You can purchase tokens called Funds ("Play4Free Funds", which used to be called "Battlefunds" during the Beta) with Real Money that you can use in the Store to purchase weapons as well, including versions that last forever.  If you are willing to purchase Play4Free Funds, you can also unlock weapons and items 'early' with them, that is, be able to purchase/unlock and equip items before the level you would normally have to be to unlock and use them.

Shotgun trial (not that kind) and the hotel from BF2.
Click to see Full Size

For the shotgun that I mentioned earlier, using these Play4Free Funds purchased with Real Money, it would cost about $.06 to use for a day and about  $1.00 to use forever. If you didn't want to spend any money for it, it seems that you can gain enough free tokens (Credits) to buy it for a day of play in about 5 or 6 rounds if your team is winning matches (about an hour of solid playtime) and just over twice that amount if your team is constantly losing matches. There was a sub-machine gun (a UMP-45) that was in the Engineer Starter Pack as a preview, and as another example, for that gun to use for one day, you would have to play about 5-6 rounds (each round lasting about 10-15 minutes) if you won most of them, and play about twice that long if your team kept losing. You can even purchase this gun (the UMP-45) to use forever with free tokens, but you would have to play about 4 hours a day for over 3 weeks and not spend much of the earned Credits on anything else. Quite a run, but if you are having fun playing the game anyway (and for free) the fact they give the option to purchase it that way is nice.

There is a Training section [the button is indicated in the picture above with green arrows] with trees and abilities to unlock for your soldier in order to drive vehicles, etc. For example: Medics do not start out with Defibrillators and must train for the equipment to revive fallen teammates.


You gain Soldier eXPerience by killing, capturing points, healing, etc and the XP gains you Levels, which unlock future items and weapons and each level gives you a Point that you can spend in MMORPG-style 'Talent Trees', where you can improve aspects of that Soldier or unlock different abilities, such as the ability for people to Spawn off of you or sense what direction damage is coming from (it doesn't do that at first), the ability to lay Claymores (and the ability to not trip them when you run by), fly vehicles and more. Thus, the more you contribute to your team by killing, capturing and healing, the more abilities to do these things you unlock. With the free Credits you gain over time as you play, the more you play, the more weapons and items you can unlock. The whole system encourages involvement and seems to work well, as there has only been a couple of games where I saw "AFK'ers" (people who have the game running but are Away From their Keyboard or not playing/helping). There were also a couple games where people said in Chat for others to "come stat-pad with them" (I left those games); but as I said, these were only a couple of games out of the 50+ I have played so far. Overall, everyone seems to be runnin'-n'-gunnin' and helping out their team just fine.

Soldiers supporting each other in a corner battle behind buildings.
Click to see Full Size

The sound in the game has differing cracks and booms for the various weapons with echo effects (Reverb) when you are inside buildings,etc and the vehicles each have their own engine sound [although there is some 'vehicle engine sounds' in the backing/environmental track that play in the background of each map (such as the rain and birds in jungle maps) that is somewhat confusing at times if your ears catch it in the background, you think a vehicle is nearby and it isn't]. I still laugh once in a while playing because every soldier uses The Wilhelm Scream. Nice. Most of the Voice Overs in the game sound like they came from BFBC2 but are tweaked a little. [The phrase when gaining control of a point still cracks me up, as it sounds like an old Clean & Clear commercial ("clear and under control.."), just like it did in BFBC2]. With the Communication Rose (Hotkey 'Q' and you choose an option, like Need Ammo) you can hear yourself and other Soldiers, but it's rare to hear someone spamming it.

 If you are having trouble hitting the numbers for the different weapons and slots, or just want to change them, you can assign other keys for them in the Game Launcher under Settings (the gears button at the top). I liked to assign the numbers for items only, so my weapons are actually Spin Mouse Wheel Up for one and Spin Mouse Wheel Down for the other.


The music, which doesn't play during regular gameplay, is a nice hard-rock/heavy-metal take on the BF theme by Corroded. A looping 2-minute track called Age Of Rage plays while you are in the Game Launcher menu that sounds a lot like the music from The Terminator movies (not a bad thing). Short phrases from their version of the theme play when you Win, Lose or Level Up and a longer version plays while Loading. The hard-rock sound fits the game well.

Always take time to enjoy the scenery in life. Here are some trees and shadows.
Click to see Full Size

Overall, Battlefield Play4Free is like most free-to-play online games that use Microtransactions: it is in fact free to download, install and play and there is also the ability to purchase items and 'boosters' to level up/unlock items faster as well - but you don't need to spend any money on it at all if you really don't want to or cannot do so (and of course have the time to play to get what you want the slower/free way). Although it feels a little clunky to play at first if you're coming from the Retail versions of the Battlefield series, once you get used to the DirectX 9 graphics and mechanics, it eventually 'feels' like a Battlefield title (A Good Thing) and once you get used to it overall - it is a lot of fun to play (The Main Thing).

I almost forgot.. the gameplay video!  This clip was a test of a few things at once; Bandicam's 'External Codec' setting using x264 (H.264/AVC) available in version 1.8.2/2012-09 [new version at the time writing this post began] and higher, Bandicam's automatic Logo overlay with transparency (our logo, lower right corner), BFP4F's one-day-only 'Starter Pack' 870 Combat Shotgun, and the uploading of a clip directly from the recorded file/output to YouTube.
Enjoy!

Video Specs and Tech Talk:

Recorded game: Battlefield Play4Free, Online FPS
Recorded with: Bandicam Registered Version @1080p
Recording codec: x264 (H.264/AVC) using the 'External Codec' implementation in Bandicam
Recording settings/variables: 'VeryFast' Preset, CRF23, 'Zero-Latency' Option selected, Logo option with transparency (our logo, lower right) 

The first of many recordings testing out Bandicam's usage of other codecs installed in a system (called 'External Codecs' in the program), this clip was recorded using the x264 Advanced Video Coding codec. Not an editing-friendly codec (it is slower to seek/move between sections within an editing application and can have artifacting issues), it still manages to work well with little effect on framerate, with the proper settings. The Constant Rate Factor quality setting of 23, recording at 1920x1080, gave an output bitrate of about 20000kbps, resulting in a file size that uses about 150MB per minute of recording (a half hour of recording at this resolution and bitrate [with MPEG-4/AVC] would take up about 4.5GB). 

The 'VeryFast' Preset in x264 auto-selects a few things, such as 1 reference frame per GOP, no Trellis encoding, no Deblocking, no CABAC and no B-type frames in the original recording/output. I suggest the faster Presets, as the slower ones compress far too much on-the-fly and create lag in the game and in the recording - more on this will come in a future article**. The CRF set at 23 allowed some 'breathing room' for recording and compressing on the fly (it is a medium quality setting, a CRF of 18 being more of a 'standard high-quality' MPEG-4 setting), it also saved a little bit of disk space as this just-over-two-minute file was only about 300MB. While still watchable and acceptable in quality, the absence of deblocking (to hide macroblocks and other compression artifacts) and the high compression of flat/low-detail areas, making them smoothed out/blurred is visible, however. It is suggested to use a higher bitrate/rate control factor (if the system can handle it), even though more diskspace will be utilized. Youtube seems to have recompressed it as well, as even at the '1080p' Youtube setting, some quality has been lost from the original uploaded file. Still, it seems acceptable for a medium quality recording setting.

**A separate article/post testing out and explaining recording with h.264/AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10) in detail, for use in programs like Bandicam, Dxtory, MSI Afterburner, etc. can be found here at this blog: http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2013/05/game-recording-with-mpeg-4-using.html

Have fun and See You In The Game!

TestRun, Video Edition: Recording Gameplay - Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (Video Samples with Brief Tutorial Video)

This is a more informal TestRun, where I was merely testing out the perceived quality of some recording codecs while attempting to get gameplay recording of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 going. As most of you know, recording this game is not just a point-and-shoot affair. Heck, most game recording applications won't even detect the way it is buffering and utilizing video memory, resulting in a black screen, flashing or very laggy output. After trying years ago and abandoning it temporarily, I was recently searching websites with information on trying it again. With no luck finding a starting point of information, I decided to figure it out on my own - and of course share my findings should anything turn out fruitful...

First, simply trying to record RCT2 with FRAPS and then Bandicam, turned up nothing as a result. Either it would not detect the screen (it is not using 2D/3D rendering/buffering on the videocard in a standard manner) or it would capture blackness (when trying Bandicam's 'Record The Screen', for instance). Since these are two well-made recording products, I assumed other products would result in the same ...result. I also seem to remember trying applications like Camtasia, back in the day..

So next, I tried good'ol 'Virtualbox'. A staple Virtual Machine emulator (think of a little computer-running-inside-a-computer), I installed an old version of WindowsXP that I had into the GuestVM. Installing my DRM-free purchase of RCT2 from Good Old Games, I tried recording the screen. No luck, since it wasn't using Direct3D in a way that I could record (after I finally got Direct3D working in it). I tried playing it in a Windowed VM and recording that. It wouldn't even run for some reason. It kept trying to 'take over' the VM and resizing it. I tried setting my Host Computer desktop resolution to 1280x720 and getting the game to detect that and run it at that resolution, 'Full Screen' and 'Seamless'. Nope. For one thing, the game kept detecting and making available only the most basic of 4:3 aspect resolutions (CRT monitor type sizes), no matter what driver/settings I used for the virtual machine (I of course wanted the more modern widescreen 16:9 ratio, as YouTube uses).

Third, I tried VMware's 'VMware Player'. A free virtual machine app, where the business version (VMware Workstation) is the go-to prog for business virtualization. Installing my XP and then RCT2 into the VM, I got it going in 720p rez and prepared Bandicam to record a "Rectangle On A Screen". It worked wonderfully. So, with the odd stutter (very few and far between), I can now record RCT2 gameplay and wanted to share my findings of the ability with everyone.

I was also messing around with different recording codecs, to see what they looked like at different settings with this game at 720p. I quickly threw together this little video showing some settings and results (Sample Video). A summary of what I have set up to record Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 gameplay is just below a short analysis of the video/recordings. Again. this isn't a 'full/technical' TestRun, it is just me sharing some tests I did and showing that one can indeed record RCT2. Further down, there is a video that goes over the steps in summary, then in slightly more detail, showing the steps taken on the screen, a short 'tutorial' I suppose. For those who haven't figured it out or got it working yet, perhaps this information will help you out, too. Enjoy!

RCT2 testing (codecs/settings) with Bandicam (Samples)

Recorded with: Bandicam, various quality settings, various codecs @ 1280x720 (720p HD)

Recorded game: Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2)

Some recording data (per codec) for this test:

MJPEG @ q80 = 45,000kbps data rate (~330MB per minute of gameplay recording)

MPEG-1 @ q80 = 11,000kbps data rate (~80MB per minute of gameplay recording)

MJPEG @ q60 = 34,000kbps data rate (~250MB per minute of gameplay recording)

MPEG-1 @ q60 = 3,000kbps data rate (~22MB per minute of gameplay recording)

*XviD and x264 are omitted as results for this test as editing/recompression resulted in corrupted video output (they will be included in a future TestRun with many codecs)

Brief analysis of sample video:

• All of the MPEG-1 settings are quite watchable, unless of course the temporal gibbs effects bothers you (the little 'ghosty/glimmer' effects that follow around the peeps). Perhaps if I didn't mention it, you might not have noticed? As with all recording/editing, if it 'looks fine to you', then you can run with it if you want. Some people "need" the best quality possible, some can watch any quality and enjoy it. If the MPEG-1 setting at 80% Quality seemed fine to you, go ahead and use that (it is about 1/4 the size of the MJPEG recordings and I have found that editing MPEG-1 is bit slower but quite possible to do in editing applications such as Sony's Vegas line of products).
• The MJPEG at a Quality of 50 percent is watchable but messy looking, as expected since a JPG (MJPEG is a series of JPG frames) at only 50% quality would have tons of compression artifacts. 60% is just as bad, with 'rough blocks' everywhere (macroblock artifacting). MJPEG at Quality80 isn't bad and very watchable, but it is much larger in bitrate usage/file size than say, MPEG-1 at the same quality setting (it is about four times larger in file size). It is the easiest codec to edit, however.
• XviD, an MPEG-4 codec, can potientially looks a lot 'cleaner' as it can handle smaller macroblocks/divisions of the screen (inherent in the improvements in MPEG-4 over MPEG-1) - but the output seems to have strong corruption (it leaves 'trails' on the screen) when attempting to edit/recompress it into a final product (as seen in the video).
• x264, a more recent 'Advanced Video Codec' version of MPEG-4, it records in wonderful quality and low file sizes - but all of that is hidden behind, again, corruption ('trails' left behind on the screen*) and slow editing.
  (The editing can be helped somewhat by specifying a smaller GroupOfPictures (frames inbetween keyframes/information frames, to help seeking through the video.)
  Keep in mind that for the MPEG-4 codecs, the corruption surfaces only when editing/recompressing the source video. The 'original' gameplay recording in MPEG-4 is quite clean and watchable, completely fine if you are just going to 'record-and-upload' to a video sharing site or personal website.
  *More on this issue and x264 recording in a future article
• A full Codec Comparison TestRun is coming, where I test out a bunch of different codecs and see how they fare for general game recording, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, AVC/h264 (MPEG-4 Part-10), MJPEG, XviD, RGB24 and more...
  
  Some related articles:
  Game recording comparison with various codecs and settings (Minecraft)
  http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/10/testrun-video-edition-fraps-vs-dxtory.html
  The ghosting/blurring effect when rendering in Sony Vegas products
  http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/10/and-more-how-to-stop-ghosting-or.html

There are a couple other ways to do it I think, but here is how I recorded Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 gameplay with Bandicam:

• Install Windows into a VM Guest (for example, a VMware virtual machine within the VMware Player application)
• Install RCT2 into that Virtual Machine, running the VM in a window (for example, 1280x720)
• Set up Bandicam to record a 'Rectangle On A Screen' and set the Rectangle to be the same size as the Virtual Machine running in a window (in this case, 1280x720) and line them up. 

That's it!

Tutorial Video on how to record Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 with Bandicam

I had seen many people on many forums asking for years how to record RCT2 gamplay. I have seen a few videos online now and so some have it working, but if you haven't been able to get it going or would like to try to make your own Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 videos, here's how. Good luck with it and have fun!

See you in the games!

Planetside 2 - Video Tutorial: How To Attack and Defend a Facility - Bio Lab (Subtitled) [Short Version]

In this brief Tutorial focused on New Players to Planetside 2, I present concepts to attacking and defending a large facility with multiple objectives, such as:

• capture points
• shields
• generators
• spawn rooms
• terminals

and more...

In the video below, I am playing on the New Conglomerate FACTION. I CAPITALIZE full words that are either important structures and names to remember, or are important concepts to learn for battle.

During this battle at a large base, I show briefly how to use your HUD (Head Up Display) to locate OBJECTIVES, what some icons on the screen represent, where major structures are and important areas and aspects of the base.

Although my FACTION successfully takes over a Bio Lab, many of the concepts presented in the tutorial will carry over to battles at other large facilities, such as Amplifier Stations and Technological Plants.

[A separate tutorial for an Amp Station can be seen here:

http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/12/planetside-2-video-tutorial-how-to.html]

With subtitles over sections of a Bio Lab battle, playing as the NC (New Conglomerate), I go over some concepts a few times to make sure they set in for New Recruits, but for the most part, I stick to the main objectives of the base and how to quickly locate them, as well as the various ways to get inside..

Enjoy and See You In the Game!

TestRun, Quick 'End Of The World' Edition Answers: Does SLI Really Make A Difference? and Where Should I Put PhysX for NVIDIA Videocards? (Text-Only Version)

Update: Added more Tests and Results - Hitman: Absolution Benchmark, Unigine: Valley Benchmark, Left 4 Dead 2 Unscripted Gameplay Test, Tribes: Ascend Gameplay Test and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum Gameplay Test

Recently becoming the proud owner of another NVIDIA card, I swapped out my trusty AMD/ATi Radeon HD 6870 from ASUS that has served me so well and lovingly joined together two GTX 560 Ti videocards in electric matrimony to try out some SLI. I share now my experiences, the results of many tests and answers to questions I have seen in many places online, including one I had myself.

This is also a 'Quick' Edition, a version of the testing and results that are text-only for now, where I may do a full version as time permits in the future, with screen recordings, graphs and other materials that I would like to share and would help people out.

The Experiment

For this TestRun, with two NVIDIA videocards, I try answer the question: "Does SLI really make a difference?" and also "Where to put PhysX?". Sure, the answer of 'if it makes a difference' is answered other places online, with pretty graphs and numbers; but I am one of those people that, although accepting, don't 'truly believe' things unless I can test it out myself. This is a human stubbornness I know, but it also helps me explore many things I would not have otherwise experienced and allows me to share those results and experiences with others. "Does it really double performance?" is probably a more specific question of what I'm feeling, as of course it should make a difference, after all I am putting another 384 processing cores towards throwing around colorful shapes on my screen. I want to know if it even 'doubles' the awesomeness of games that I play. There are two cards in there now, so what's the difference in performance?

Another aspect I plan to explore is regarding PhysX, NVIDIA's lovechild of bouncing balls and splattering sparks. Does it affect game performance? Which card should run it if I have it on? Is it better to run it on a dedicated card [that only uses it for that] or off of the CPU? These are my own questions as well since finding a second NVIDIA gpu on sale... PhysX is only in a hamfisted-handful of games - and is only going to be found on NVIDIA GPUs, but it is supposed to improve visual/perceived quality in the games that do use it, due to the fancy waving flags, shattering glass and splattering blood [and the like]. I am going to test the options of having it on the first or second SLI card and how PHysX runs off of the CPU, too.

The Test

For this TestRun, I used utilities such as FurMark and FluidMark, Unigine's Heaven Benchmark and a handful of games to benchmark and test with, such as Just Cause 2, Alien Vs. Predator, Lost Planet 2, Battlefield 3, Unreal Tournament 3 and Batman: Arkham City (all but the first two utilize PhysX). I am currently running an AMD 6-Core CPU and two GTX560Ti's in SLI mode on a GIGABYTE 990FXA chipset mainboard.
I assume this is still an average-to-above-average system at the time of this writing (perhaps upper midrange but definitely not top-of-the-line) and it would help out anyone with a similar rig in the future as well with examples of some of the performance difference they will see [if they add a second videocard].

The Data

Here are my benchmarking test results and average framerates, comparing SLI mode with a single GPU:

FurMark: Score (2127), Average Framerate (40fps)
FurMark: Score (3959), Average Framerate (65fps) SLI
Lost Planet 2 - Benchmark B: Average Framerate (44fps)
Lost Planet 2 - Benchmark B: Average Framerate (103fps) SLI
Just Cause 2: Concrete Jungle Benchmark, High Settings, Average Framerate (28fps)
Just Cause 2: Concrete Jungle Benchmark, High Settings, Average Framerate (51fps) SLI
Alien Vs. Predator: Benchmark Run, 1920x1200, x16 Filtering, Average Framerate (44fps)
Alien Vs. Predator: Benchmark Run, 1920x1200, x16 Filtering, Average Framerate (90fps) SLI
Unigine Heaven Benchmark: 1080p, x4x4 Filtering, Score (960), Average Framerate (38fps)
Unigine Heaven Benchmark: 1080p, x4x4 Filtering, Score (1717), Average Framerate (68fps) SLI

Unigine Valley Benchmark: 1080p, Ultra Settings, 8xMSAA - Score (1077), Average Framerate (26fps)

Unigine Valley Benchmark: 1080p, Ultra Settings, 8xMSAA - Score (1741), Average Framerate (42fps) SLI Hitman: Absolution Benchmark: 1080p, Ultra Settings, Average Framerate (32fps) Hitman: Absolution Benchmark: 1080p, Ultra Settings, Average Framerate (33fps) SLI (Hitman: Absolution does not appear to take advantage of SLI and/or is not Optimized for it, despite double-checking that SLI mode is enabled and trying to utilize NVIDIA's 'Custom Game Profile' for it, as well - the following two games also do not appear to take advantage of SLI mode) Tribes: Ascend - 1920x1080, Very High Settings, Average Framerate (51fps) Tribes: Ascend - 1920x1080, Very High Settings, Average Framerate (53fps) SLI Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum - 1600x900, 8xAA, Reflections and other (17fps) Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum - 1600x900, 8xAA, Reflections and other (19fps) SLI Here are some unscripted, raw gameplay framerates, averaged: (multiple samples taken of each with FRAPS' built-in benchmarking utility) Alien Vs. Predator: Marine Storyline, Average Framerate (47fps) Alien Vs. Predator: Marine Storyline, Average Framerate (89fps) SLI Battlefield 3 : Multiplayer with 64 Players, Average Framerate (33fps) Battlefield 3 : Multiplayer with 64 Players, Average Framerate (61fps) SLI Left 4 Dead 2 - 1920x1080, Very High Settings, 4xMSAA, 4xAF, Extra Film Grain (128fps) Left 4 Dead 2 - 1920x1080, Very High Settings, 4xMSAA, 4xAF, Extra Film Grain (185fps) SLI *Planetside 2 : Multiplayer with many players, BioLab, Average Framerate (36fps) *Planetside 2 : Multiplayer with many players, BioLab, Average Framerate (37fps) SLI [*Game does not appear to be fully optimized currently, article with more detail here: http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/11/planetside-2-and-ultra-settings-quality.html) Here are the PhysX tests, done with FluidMark: FluidMark: Score (5338) single-card mode, PhysX on the card, Average Framerate (87fps) FluidMark: Score (5449) SLI, PhysX set to (GPU1), Average Framerate (89fps) FluidMark: Score (7512) SLI, PhysX auto-selected (GPU2), Average Framerate (123fps) FluidMark: Score (7379) SLI, PhysX set on (GPU2) Dedicated, Average Framerate (121fps) FluidMark: Score (1291) SLI, PhysX set on (CPU), Average Framerate (21fps) The Conclusion So, does putting in a second videocard practically 'double' your gaming performance? Dang right it does. Now, I have read that it 'should' in many other articles online, but again, I had to test it out for myself. Almost across the board, in every game I threw at it, the performance was almost doubled. Wonderful stuff. For those about to spend money on a second GPU for SLI because now they know it 'will definitely make a difference', I should mention as a Tip here that the more cards you add in (for 3-way or 4x SLI or Crossfire, for instance) the lower the rate-of-return you actually get on the investment. In other words, adding a third card won't 'double the performance again' and adding a fourth card won't 'double that performance yet again' -  it won't even give you 300% and 400% performance [for the third and fourth videocards added]. You will actually see diminishing returns as you add more cards. Still, if you have enough money for only a second GPU that matches your 'old' one, but not enough money to splurge on a new, faster one, clearly SLI/Crossfire is the way to go, it really does make a huge difference. The PhysX tests are interesting, as they answer a question that I myself was wondering: does it matter whether you set PhysX on GPU1, GPU2 or the CPU, and should a GPU be dedicated to it? It seems to make sense, that although a powerful, complex 6-core processor, my CPU is nowhere near the raw number-crunching [if 'simpler'] streamlined data-geyser that the 384-core video card is. The difference can be clearly seen in the results. On the CPU, PhysX calculations [alone/isolated] gave a 23fps output of gushing blood on the screen, while even just one videocard running PhysX by itself put out 87fps of crimson data. Adding another card and telling that GPU instead [of utilizing the first card] to 'calculate the physics if you please' took the framerate up to over 120fps. Clearly, NVIDIA is showing that the videocards were made to handle the floating leaves, sparks and bouncing balls of PhysX ...and ball handle they did. What is interesting is the difference that was made, depending on which card you chose to handle PhysX. When the PhysX was set to GPU2 (the card not plugged directly into the monitor in my case), the highest score was achieved. When the PhysX was set to GPU1 (the card plugged directly into the monitor), it scored almost exactly the same as if there was no second card in the system at all. Now, the utility (FluidMark) does test 'only' PhysX and there isn't much to see on the screen other than some bouncing baubles, but it seems to show that if you put PhysX on the same card that you are using as your display card (that your monitor plugs into), then it might in fact affect performance of that card to display the pretty images on your screen slightly - or at least, to 'deal with PhysX and show pretty colors on your screen' at the same time. Either way, they are both better than utilizing the CPU, as the pitiful performance when on the CPU (at least for 'mainly PhysX only' calculations) is over 500% slower than the performance seen when PhysX calculations are put on the second video card, and still calculated at over 400% slower compared to when PhysX is put on the first video card in an SLI setup. Clearly it is better to have PhysX calculations done on a GPU - and perhaps not put it on the main display card if you can. Testing the ramification of this in actual gameplay, I played some Unreal Tournament 3 and Batman: Arkham City, while juggling the PhysX of both games to be calculated on the CPU, GPU2 and GPU1 (the main display card where the monitor is plugged in). Using FRAPS for collecting benchmark data in Average Frames Per Second, I saw no more than a few frames difference between all modes. That is, playing with PhysX set to GPU2, PhysX set on GPU1 or putting the PhysX onto the CPU, I saw only a few frames of difference in actual gameplay performance. Mind you, it can be argued that I didn't see as many sparks, blood, snow or leaves float across my screen at times; but overall, if you are concerned with only "the game performance ramifications" of where to put PhysX, The Answer Is: playing a game, it doesn't really matter (but the CPU calculates PhysX slower than putting it on any card, as seen in the data). Overall, if you can't afford that fast, newly-released videocard you want, but you can afford to get another GPU of the same type as the one you have now - and your motherboard and powersupply can support it - it's totally worth it to get a second videocard for SLI/Crossfire performance (and if you're going the NVIDIA route, it doesn't really matter where you put PhysX). Have fun upgrading and See You In The Games If The World Doesn't End Soon!

Planetside 2 - Video Tutorial: How To Attack and Defend a Facility - Amp Station (Subtitled) [Long Version]

In this Tutorial focused on New Players to Planetside 2, I present concepts to attacking and defending a large facility with multiple objectives, such as:

• capture points
• shields
• generators
• spawn rooms
• terminals

and more...

In the video below, I am playing the Engineer CLASS, on the Terran Republic FACTION. I start out covering basic actions such as choosing your CLASS, EQUIPMENT and DEPLOYMENT into battle. I CAPITALIZE full words that are either important structures and names to remember, or are important concepts to learn for battle.

Upon arrival at a large base, I show how to use your HUD (Head Up Display) to locate OBJECTIVES, what icons on the screen represent, where things are and how to locate different areas and aspects of a shielded base.

Although I arrive at and successfully attack and defend an Amp Station, many of the concepts presented in the tutorial will carry over to battles at other large facilities, such as Biological Labs and Technological Plants.

[A separate tutorial for a Bio Lab can be found here:

http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/12/planetside-2-video-tutorial-how-to_27.html]

With subtitles over this 'one take' battle that stretched on 'overnight', I go over some concepts a few times, just to make sure they set in for New Recruits.
I do say less and less over time however and hopefully by the end, you will know exactly why I am looking where I am looking, going where I am going and doing what I am doing - and you will know how to do it all too...

Enjoy and See You In the Game!

Quality Test - Planetside 2 and 'Ultra' Settings (1080p Video), Screenshots

Although I am still working on a First Impressions for this game, I am just having waaay too much fun playing and testing out different settings on it. For those who don't know, Planetside 2 is a Free-To-Play MMOFPS (massively multiplayer online first person shooter) and is available on Steam for easy install and login.

Now, when I first tried playing the game, it sometimes got sluggish and choppy, even though my system isn't 'old' yet, with a 6-core AMD CPU and a Radeon HD 6870. So, being a computer technician, I got down to [having fun] troubleshooting..

The first thing I noticed is that larger fights lagged out the game more. Defending a little outpost with a dozen or so people running around, the game flew at 60fps; but in a large Bio-dome 3-faction battle with what must have been a hundred players tearing about, my frames per second dropped below 30 quite often.

What do you do in this case? That's right, lower the graphic settings. In an OPTIONS or SETTINGS menu (as it is in this game) you can usually find Video settings that you can lower or disable, to help the game perform better, by telling your videocard, "don't do this... or that". The funny thing is, putting it on Medium and then Low, made no difference whatsoever.

What does that mean? In case you didn't know, that means that it is not your videocard that is getting overworked. If running on Low settings with no special effects, the game is sluggish and turning everything up to High with all the bells and whistles, the game is just sluggy (yes I make up words), it is not your videocards' fault. Don't send it to it's room just yet.

What is happening then, is that somewhere else there is a limitation of some sort. Loading models/polygons/effects and other things as you move, the hard drive has to feed data to be displayed. My hard drive light wasn't going on much (I defragment often), so it must have been something else. My RAM tested out ok, so what's next? That's right, the CPU. Looking at the performance of my 'main-brain' processor as the game ran, showed it didn't really overuse it either though, only about 20-60% at most. It also didn't use more than about 1.5GB of RAM, so it must be running in 32-bit address space (if your head got 'swimmy' at that last couple sentences, it means the game didn't tire out my computer very much).

Now I don't want to point fingers without really knowing, but the testing suggests that there is possible CPU optimization problems, either within my system, or on the server systems (and possibly some data communication issues). After doing a little research into what I found was a large number of people having problems, I read that the developers have promised some sort of optimization patches over the next while. Great! I see already, whenever I load the game, that there are little hotfixes and patches coming down the pipe. A good sign of good treatment for the game, hopefully.

Looking around some more, I also found there was an 'Ultra' graphics setting in the Beta (I have been in many but I was not in this game's Beta phase) that was taken out. I assume this is to limit the work put onto players' systems and appeal to a wider audience of older hardware owners. However, it was still somewhat usable now, as long as you didn't mind doing some text editing of a settings file in the game's folder. Of course, I had to test it out!

What was essentially an uploaded text file with no Creditation (it just says Uploaded By: A Guest), what it contained were some settings such as turning up Draw Distance and Lighting Quality, by setting it to a higher number than the game normally does (the game's HIGH setting seems to be '3' and this text file was suggesting '5' in many places). Trying it out, some screenshots of the result are right here:

This wasn't taken with Ultra settings (I was running on High at the time), but 

I liked this shot from the BioLab atrium and wanted to share it, it's my wallpaper at the moment:

The problem was, these Ultra settings didn't really help the lag/sluggish gameplay I was experiencing, although it made it look spectacular. Since the issue of the sluggishness seemed to possibly be tied to CPU optimizations, I further changed the settings on my own, lowering ones that taxed/used the CPU more - and lo' and behold, what I ended up with was a nice, smooth, excitement-adding(!) gameplay performance - from a batch of settings that I now want to share with everyone else!

The [what seems to be] original "Ultra Config" settings are found here:
http://pastebin.com/XFkf8sYJ
^ That is a website where people can upload and share text files and you can simply save it as the text file it is and rename it UserOptions.ini and put it in your
<whatever drive steam is on>//ProgramFiles/Steam/steamapps/common/PlanetSide2
folder. (Make a backup copy of the original if you want)

Since those settings resulted in great-looking graphics, I wanted to keep most of it, but simply changed some of the more CPU-utilizing effects. My changes were all under the section Rendering (you can just copy and paste this 'Rendering' section over your 'Rendering' section in your UserOptions.ini if you want to):

[Rendering]
GraphicsQuality=5
TextureQuality=0
ShadowQuality=3
RenderDistance=2000.000000
Gamma=0.000000
MaximumFPS=60
UseLod0a=0
VSync=0
OverallQuality=-1
LightingQuality=3
FogShadowsEnable=1
EffectsQuality=5
TerrainQuality=3
FloraQuality=3
FloraDistanceScale=2.000000
ModelQuality=5
ParticleQuality=5
ParticleLOD=5
MotionBlur=1
BlurQuality=3
MotionBlurQuality=3
VerticalFOV=74
AO=1
AmbientOcclusionQuality=3
AOQuality=3
GpuPhysics=1

* Update: we have put our own Pastebin text file of the entire UserOptions.ini up here (simply save it/rename it to UserOptions.ini): http://pastebin.com/6j9aHVav

** For even more performance while still looking nice overall, try inserting these settings, most of which release even more CPU demand from the game:

RenderDistance=1000.000000, FogShadowsEnable=0, EffectsQuality=2, ParticleQuality=2, ParticleLOD=2

As you can see, most of the textures, complexity and other effects are up, but I lowered a few things like the terrain and shadows (these seemed to use the CPU quite a bit) and the draw distance, which still looks good at "2000". With these settings, I now had a much smoother, still-pretty result! Recording some gameplay as a test of both the new settings and showing the increase in performance, here is few couple minutes of playing as a Medic and Engineer with the settings above:

Recorded with Bandicam Licensed Version at 1920x1080p, 'Default' setting (MPEG-1 Quality 80 VBR)
playing Planetside 2, a free-to-play MMOFPS

That was just a simple pasting of some short tests together, taken in a time of low light/at night and then during the daytime when I went and found some BioLab fighting (which is usually a site of sluggish performance for most people, I know it was for me) where there are many other soldiers around. It shows an example of  the lighting, effects and clarity of the textures, both inside and outside (except for one or two that seemed to be 'stuck' at low resolution) that you can get with these Ultra settings - as well as the smoothness of gameplay that you can even have with my tweaks to them! If you want to make sure the game doesn't change them back (or you don't by accident), make the file Read-Only.

I'm not the greatest player, but I enjoy playing a Medic and Engineer, helping support my team. In the video, you get to see some Healing and Repairing and the Engineer's Turret that he can construct (and then only he can use it) and my Friendly Fire Warning I got using Claymores (if anyone on your team is too close when it goes off after detecting an enemy they get hurt too). You actually get three or four Warnings, but people were standing in front of my Clays a lot when they took out enemies and then you can see my shooting in the back a little in a firefight at the door there, as we all ran in and around it...don't worry it's not easy to get Weapon Locked. If you get a few warnings, just watch out for other people (sometimes you can't help what they do) or even move to a less busy area or just Repair and Heal people for a while.

Hopefully these tweaks will help some of you out there. It's sad to have such a great game with such a large-feeling scope of battle have so many people upset and frustrated that it's too laggy or sluggish and having those people give up or leave or think the game isn't good at all. Don't forget the promise/rumors of further tweaks and optimizations coming out soon, too. Since I can honestly say it helped my bad performance problem, I can honestly say that it should help you, if you are experiencing low fps in your gameplay - and it will look great! If anyone is still having sluggish gameplay, let me know and I can try tweaking the settings a little more to squeeze more out of it and see what happens. Whether you have to turn everything down, or if you can run it full blast, or with these tweaks, I hope you can enjoy the game eventually, and that these tweaks helped some of you at least a little bit.

*** By the way, for those worried about SOE's stance on modifying game files, etc. their Official Statement on client modification is here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/important-client-modifications.54265/ 

Quote:
"The most simple guidance here is do not use third party programs which change the Planetside 2 gameplay in any way unless it has been specifically cleared by SOE.
The above does not apply to user initiated *.INI changes, those are allowed, although setting your own options incorrectly can result in bugs."

So they are mainly talking about hacks like aimbots, memory injectors like Cheat Engine, etc.
Thankfully, merely changing how it is displayed on your own screen (as we are doing here) is O.K. Just don't set any of the settings 'too high' or you can cause problems (they call them bugs) such as corrupted display, really really laggy gameplay, and so on (don't worry, you won't hurt your hardware, the game will just crash or something similar). Thanks for letting us tweak the video options, SOE!

NOTE: When experimenting with these changes, please remember that any problems arising from them should not be added to the already heavy load of Sony Online Entertainment's Technical Support Department. Please 'reset' any modifications by deleting the UserOptions.ini file and then after further troubleshooting, bring PS2 problems to the attention of SOE and their staff. Thanks  

Also.. there seems to be a problem with long play sessions, the game gets more and more sluggish for many people. It has been suggested that is is possibly a Memory Leak problem and for now, to restart (the game and/or your system) after a long battle, so that the next one will possibly have less problems. Hopefully this isn't an issue for everyone.

[Update: Testing these settings with an NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti and then with two GTX 560 Ti's in SLI mode, there was near nil increase in performance when switching to SLI. It seems that the bottleneck truly is within the CPU optimizations.
As a sidenote, I was getting about 30fps on average with the NVIDIA cards in my system (even in SLI) and was getting about 40fps on average with the AMD/ATi card in the same system. This is normal however, as some games perform slightly better with one than the other (as the coders develop the game on one or the other/company optimizations/etc. Something could be said for AMD doing some optimizations between the videocard and the CPU when an AMD GPU is coupled with an AMD CPU in the same system, but as I do not work for the company, I do not know.. it does make sense however).]



Personal Notes/Opinions:

At the time of this posting, the game seems to have a lot of aliasing (in my opinion), even at 1080p or higher resolutions. If you want to enable AA, you can do so by forcing it in your videocard's Control Panel. FXAA (NVIDIA) and MLAA (Morphological, AMD/ATi) are both versions of post-processing that should work and be visible in the game [I tested it with AMD's MLAA, the difference is visible]. 
Note that these post-processing AA techniques may not be able to be captured in screenshots and game recordings (Fraps, Bandicam, Dxtory, Playclaw, etc) although the effects may be visible while playing the game [in some games processing such as SweetFX can be capped, some can't].
As per SOE's Official Statement and replies, use of SweetFX is NOT suggested as it is still in the category of utilities that can result in being banned:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/important-client-modifications.54265/
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...modifications-announcement.55674/#post-692380




See you in the game!