Disable hardware acceleration in Vista?

Hi, I've tried to make an in-world movie but I can't get a smooth picture. It looks like the movie has a very low frame rate. It 'jumps', I don't know the right English word for that, hope you understand what I mean.

I first tried the movie recorder in SL itself. Then I tried Camtasia, but the results are always the same: not a smooth running movie. I even increased the recording framerate and used the smallest movie size I could pick, but again no result.

I've read that I should disable hardware acceleration for my graphics card, but I don't know how to do that in Vista. From what I've read it isn't even possible?

When I try to record a movie, I have only SL open and the movie capture program (Camtasia). Windows Live OneCare is running too.

Is hardware acceleration the problem? Or could there be another solution? Hope someone can help me. My specs:

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System Information
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Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6000) (6000.vista_gdr.071023-1545)
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz (2 CPUs), ~900MHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Current Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: SyncMaster 931B/931BF/931BA/930BA(Digital)
Driver Name: nvd3dum.dll,nvwgf2um.dll
Driver Version: 7.15.0011.6369 (English)
Sound: SB Audigy
Driver Version: 5.12.0001.2004 (English)

There is more to the specs of the CPU and GC when grabbing footage from an OpenGL platform. For instance, if your Hard Discs cannot cope with the data flow, it will either hang or drop frames.

I also run Vista, although my system specs are slightly higher than yours, I do have an array of 2tb Sata II Hard Discs, whats more, try looking to see what fps your client is getting by pressing Ctrl+Shift+1, the actual fps your client is working with will show in the top meter of that window (press the same again to clear it). If you are only rendering at 10fps, that is slightly higher than what you will be able to capture at. Ideally, you should aim for around an average of 25fps.

If you are rendering at 25+ fps, then it could potentially be your Storage device(s). You could try using HyperCam (my personal favourite), which allows you to choose on the fly the screen zone of capture, and as long as you are not too fussy about overall quality, use the Automatic setting for codec used for capture.

Consider also your connection. Having a quoted 8mb asdl connection is at best the absolute in perfect conditions, at a range of 20 yards from the exchange, potential. In reality, you may fluctuate between 1-5mb. To capture at smooth framerates, you need a minimum of 2mb consistency of connection to maintain flow and quality. Turning off voice during capture will aid that process, typically VIOP hijacks upto 2mb of your connection.

Hardware acceloration is handled by your Graphics board, your particular board is more than capable of giving you 25fps or greater in ideal conditions. I used one for quite sometime when capturing media for our movies, until 3 months ago, when I increased that to the 8800GT, and now awaiting my new setup which has twin (Sli) 8800GT's with 1gb DDR3 each, configuration. The actual gains, believe it or not, aren't that great, a little more heat in which to cook with, being the greatest .

In my experience, your bottle neck is potentially your HD. Please post specs and I can perhaps help further.

Before you go nuts altering stuff in your computer, have you checked your SL settings to make sure it's not you that's causing the lag.

Framerate is controlled by any number of factors, some under your control, some not.

Stuff that isn't under your control:
The design of the sim you are in (some sims are just over designed and more laggy than others)
The number of other avatars in the sim you are filming in (if you've got a lot of noobs wearing AO's, particle generator and full array of attachments, you'll see the framerate plummet)
The servers -- sometimes they're hot, sometimes they're not.

None of the above you can alter... except in you can choose to film in locations that have less lag, fewer avatars and you can choose to film when the servers are running hotter.

Stuff you can change:

Firstly you need to understand which viewer you are using:

The standard viewer is the most stable and runs fastest (of the ones I've found so far... would love to find a faster one)
Windlight gives you a lot more control options... but all of those come with a price in terms of framerate.

If you need speed use the standard viewer... if you need pretty skies use Windlight (or cheat and chromakey your actors in the main viewer and put them onto WIndlight backrounds.. he he)

In the standard viewer preferences check the following:

1) Network --- you should try to get a match between your actual bandwidth and your"maximum bandwidth setting (most people have this set far too high) a setting of 500 or less is probably about right.
(when you're around a lot of newbies and the framerate falls through the floor, usually it's because they've all go their maximum bandwidth set too high)
2) Graphics -- unless you're doing a wide shot or a long shot, then you can afford to bring your draw distance down to about 64m... the less the draw distance the faster your framerate will run)
3) Graphical Detail - if you've got "enable vertex shaders" and "enable bumpmapping and shinny" ticked, sure you'll get the visual advantages, but your framerate will drop.
There are four sliders at the bottom for "mesh detail" the higher you have them, the slower the frame rate.
4) Advanced Graphics - Antisotropic filtering slows down framerates, if you push your FOG setting upto 4 it disables it and you'll gain some speed. High particle counts slow down the framerate... and if you lower the "outfit composit limit" that will also speed things up.
5) AUDIO AND VIDEO - streaming audio and video really slows everything down, so disable them when you are shooting.
6) VOICE CHAT - same again, disable it when you are shooting, unless you're using Motor Mouth to fake a lip sync of course

As you can see, with most of these changes you are trading graphical quality for speed.

In Windlight - push the graphics lever all the way to the left for speed and all the way to the right to shoot really pretty hi-rez stills

There is other stuff you can do... but the principles are the same as in the standard viewer.


Other stuff you can control:

1) What you're wearing - if you're shooting someone else strip your avatar down to basics: no AO, no attachments apart from the camera, replace anything flexi with something that isn't (In fact if I'm not in shot I've a grey-unrezzed avatar I use, no hair, just the basic body)
If you're shooting yourself, then only wear what you need for the shot. (Yes, that means putting all your xcite attachments back in your inventory ... unless... well, let's not go there)

2) Keep your shots simple
A moving camera puts more strain on the framerate than a static one, simply because everything in the shot is changing all of the time. The faster you move the camera, the more pressure you put on the system.

And finally:
Remember that the capture software itself is eating up CPU... so if you've got a framerate of 24 before you turn over, it could drop to 15 or less when the capture software kicks in.

So, chances are that if you're trying to film a flying track shot, over a car chase, through a cloud of twenty avatars all wearing their free gangsta AO's and bling up to their eyeballs... and you're trying to do this when America is awake and there are more people online... and you're filming in Windlight with all the setting set to max... then chances are you are going to get a lot of lag.

Hope this has helped... just remember there is more than your machine in the equation and actually the additional graphical qualities don't make for a better film...

And finally... a post production fix

If you've got a pice of footage that is OK, but then stalls... then jumps... well, go to the point where it stalls and see how many frames of static footage you've got... if you take out all but two, you might get lucky and have the footage run properly.

Its true, lower settings equals more frames per second... but as I said, your specs are not disimilar to the ones I was using a few months ago and achieved a lot of windlight movies at high frame rates and speed (watch this one for the flycam through the waterways, done in realtime http://www.wba-advertising.com/shengrila/duchess.html if you dont believe me).

What's missing is information about the kind of adsl connection.

An 8mb pipe may pull a consistent 1-2 mb, but if we're talking about someone trying to do this on a 1M pipe they'll be lucky to consistently pull 300kb/s

At 300kb/s no amount of hardware adjustment is going to give smooth shooting... especially in Windlight at anything but minimum settings.

As the hardware is up to spec, (not my area of expertise, unless it's got an apple on the case) chances are the network connection speed is going to be the bottle neck. In which case sacrifice of graphical rez is going to be the key to solving this problem (or buying a faster connection, of course).

But as I said before, lower graphical res doesn't mean worse images. I'm not a huge fan of the Windlight look, especially at higher rez. I guess it comes down to what you want to achieve.