Offline rendering for 3dmark or other pretty benchmark/demo content?

[cirthix]

Hi,
I'm looking to generate uncompressed 4k@480Hz video, preferably a capture from a well-known 'pretty' scene with a good amount of various kinds of movement. Camera pans with foregroud+background, objects crossing each others paths, that sort of thing.

We have been trying to do live capture of vsync'd output from benchmarks, but realtime rendering has it's limitations (as well as the gear we have now).

Alternatively, we can take a very slow moving sequence and play it back faster, but our capture equipment can only do 4k60 and even slow scenes would typically look like a rollercoaster at 8x speed.

Multiple runs with merging frames based on a timestamp is an option, but the timestamp would have to have 1ms or better precision.

Please no discussions along the lines of "You don't need that". I do, it is for research.

10bit color is a plus but not easy at this time.

 

[ViRGE]

It's entirely possible I'm missing something here, but isn't this precisely what 3DMark's "Fixed Timeline Step" function is for? Turn on v-sync and triple buffering, and then set it to run at a fixed step of 480, and you should get a render that renders 480 frames per in-game second. Which due to v-sync would be spit out at 60 frames per real second, at an 8:1 time ratio.

 

[cirthix]

It's entirely possible I'm missing something here, but isn't this precisely what 3DMark's "Fixed Timeline Step" function is for? Turn on v-sync and triple buffering, and then set it to run at a fixed step of 480, and you should get a render that renders 480 frames per in-game second. Which due to v-sync would be spit out at 60 frames per real second, at an 8:1 time ratio.

That sounds perfect for my uses, thanks, I'll check out this feature 🙂

 

[ViRGE]

If you could, please let me know how that goes. I don't know what happens if rendering a frame takes longer than the Fixed Timeline Step interval, so I'm curious as to what occurs.

 

[cirthix]

The options are a bit confusing. There is an fps field (locked to below 100fps) but also a frame start and frame stop field. I requested 12200 frames (shoudl be ~240Hz) of the firestrike scene and it did generate them all (96GB of bmps heh), so I assume that it is at 240Hz. A quick look showed that frames seemed evenly spaced and not duplicated.

Rendering was significantly slower than realtime (hd7970, i5@4.5GHz), took a while to complete.

Will reply again after I watch the video on a proper 240Hz display.