You couldn't ask for a lamer topic!

[Spectere]

I've recorded on some pretty low end hardware before (my most viewed video on YouTube was recorded on a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with a GeForce 6600GT--which an Ivy Bridge Intel CPU with an HD4000 will easily beat) and my framerate didn't take a hit. The only way you're likely to see a major hit is if the game constantly hits the HDD or if it's CPU bound (and in the era of multicore it's rare for a game to use multithreading aggressively enough for that to be a limiting factor).

I don't think you'll have a problem, honestly.

[Bobbias]

Recording definitely has an effect on osu's framerate. Enough that there's no way I'd even try a liveplay in osu. But at least part of that is because osu's input is not decoupled from it's rendering, so bad framerate = random bad accuracy even when you're playing fine.

Someday when I'm not lazy I'll see how it affects sm, since that does have decoupled input.

[Spectere]

Yeah, I though about it a bit and realized that you might run into issues because you're dealing with shared memory. It's going to definitely be faster scraping the framebuffer of a dedicated GPU than an onboard chip.

Have you tried playing around with the video options in osu? I do recall having to tweak them a bit for it to run acceptably on my tablet (a cheap HP Stream 7...about as low-end as you can get, I imagine).

[Bobbias]

Osu's options are not particularly tweakable. I already have pretty much every distracting/flashing/extra visual element disabled. Mania mode runs at considerably lower framerates than standard regardless of settings. When recording I could not find any set of settings that didn't wreck my framerate. Ingame frame limiter is bad, limiting with fraps was better (using no compression), but still had terrible stuttering that would make it flat out unplayable. OBS encoding to x264 is slightly better, but only just.

I'm playing on a Lenovo g500s Touch without the optional nvidia chip.

[Spectere]

If changing the encoding options makes things better than you might be running into CPU contention (or HDD...I'm not sure exactly how osu! streams data from the disk). Either that or osu! just does things in a way that makes it really inefficient for screen recorders.

Speaking of which, which recording software have you tried using? Maybe that has something to do with it.

[Bobbias]

I've tried Fraps and OBS. I've been using OBS lately because it works better, and I don't have to encode my videos separately. Also, according to Process Hacker Osu runs my GPU at like 90% by itself. No idea how accurate that is, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

EDIT: did a bit of testing. Looks like recording SM vis OBS works pretty damn well. Now if only I could improve my reading so I could actually play decently hard stuff properly I'd be happy.

[Spectere]

What the bloody hell is osu! doing that's making it take 90% of an HD4000? Does your laptop have a 1080p panel or something and it's just the fill rate that's killing it?

For reference, the aforementioned tablet that I occasionally play it on is using a quad-core Intel Atom with a GPU that makes the HD4000 look like a Titan X, though it is running at a fairly low resolution (1366x768, I believe).

[Bobbias]

lol, osu's code is pretty famous for being unoptimized as fuck. It's possible he's just doing something that you should just not be doing on this GPU. Peppy is not a good programmer, just a dedicated one. Also, mania runs worse than standard. Mania was developed by some chinese guy with essentially no input from peppy, and relies on tons of ugly hacks and god knows what else.

The game's UI looks nice. The community integration features are great (though there are plenty of missed opportunities). And that's pretty much everything nice I can say about osu. Well, on second thought, at least it runs on windows 8 without requiring some dirty hacks, so it beats out o2jam there.

[Spectere]

Well, that much is obvious. One thought: are you running with vsync on or off (I can't remember if the game has an option for it)? If it's off and there's no frame limiter, that would explain why it's hammering your GPU. Failing that, he might be writing out textures way more often than he really has to.

O2Jam is pretty badly coded (not to mention just being badly designed in general) but, to be fair, most of the problems with it on Windows 8 are Microsoft-related. In a nutshell, DirectDraw doesn't get along with Aero, and when Microsoft saw fit to make Aero mandatory for Windows 8 it broke a ton of games because of how shitty their DDraw emulation is. The only reason they worked so well in Vista and 7 is because they turn Aero off when you run a DDraw application fullscreen. Windows 8 never turns it off, ever.

Fortunately, several people have developed DirectDraw wrappers, including the Wine team (Wine's ddraw.dll is essentially a DirectDraw to OpenGL wrapper). This build of the Wine ddraw.dll works well for O2Jam (don't run the setup or anything, just drill down into \ddrawfix\wined3d in the ZIP and extract those DLLs into the O2Jam directory). It brought my framerate up from about 4-5fps to a smooth 60.

[Bobbias]

Vsync in osu is something nobody should EVER use. since osu doesn't process input separately from rendering, limiting to 60hz fucks your ability to hit shit on time pretty hard.

There's also the d3d windower option for o2jam. And once it's been windowed you can run a tool that makes the window resizable.

[Spectere]

Well that would be why it's maxing your GPU. And it's also a valuable lesson for anyone who decides to program a rhythm game (I mean, honestly, that's about the worst way he could have implemented input).

[Bobbias]

There ARE plans to decouple them sometime in the future. Peppy's working on fixing some stuff up before making the code "open source" (sans the networking stuff so nobody can go take the client and make their own back end easily, and so peppy still gets the final say in anything making it in) and that's one of the things he plans on fixing (as well as the rendering system, among other things).

But yeah, that's absolutely retarded.

[Zephlar]

I've tried Fraps and OBS.

I use Fraps all the time. I found the reason my frame rate was always getting hit so hard was because I was recording to the same HDD my games were playing off of. Once I switched Fraps to record on my other hard drive the frame rate drop disappeared completely.

[Bobbias]

I'm on a laptop. Don't have another harddrive to record to, or I'd have done that.

[Zephlar]

I'm on a laptop. Don't have another harddrive to record to, or I'd have done that.

Ah I see.