I recently changed PCs, I went from having an Intel Core i5 4460 with integrated graphics card to a Xeon E5 2678 v3 with AMD RADEON RX 550 graphics.
On paper, the new PC is on the order of 3 to 7 times more powerful than the old one and I can attest that this is the case in daily use, video and image editing etc. The advantage of having so many cores and threads available is palpable. In terms of games I haven't tried it because I'm not really a gamer and the few games I use are the typical free ones that come with Debian and some emulators that, honestly, already worked fine with the old PC.
However there is one task that brings me head over heels for its terrible performance: video screen capture.
With my old PC I was able to capture at over 60 fps at full screen while doing any task I needed to record.
Even with my lenovo thinkpad x230 I am able to capture screen at over 80fps with total fluency.
The command I have always used is:
ffmpeg -f x11grab -draw_mouse 1 -framerate 60 -video_size 1920x1200 -i :0.0+1680,0 -qscale 0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -preset medium -qp 0 -q:v 1 -s 1920x1200 -f matroska -threads 4 video.mkv
notes:
-video_size 1920x1200 -i :0.0+1680,0 y -s 1920x1200 are the dimensions and position of the region to capture (my right monitor).
Notice that I even used -preset medium and software encoding, so I got very good quality even with that parameter setting and without ever going below 60 fps.
What happens to me now?
The equipment is unable to capture more than 20 fps which makes any video invalid, with frame drops and not even reach 30fps, which would be the minimum required.
In addition, it is quite noticeable the decrease in responsiveness of the PC as soon as I launch the command. That is, all that fluidity and smoothness that is appreciated when working normally, disappears and even moving a window from one side to another is rough and stumbling.
I have tried with different parameters of ffmpeg, to capture raw, without encoding.
I have tried saving the resulting video directly to RAM disk in order to avoid the possible bottleneck of writing to disk. It doesn't affect it at all.
So, does anyone have any suggestions as to at least where I can dig further to find a solution to the problem?
Additional data, in case it helps:
$ → inxi
CPU: 12-Core Intel Xeon E5-2678 v3 (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1201/1200/3300 MHz Kernel: 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 x86_64
Up: 1d 6h 55m Mem: 6427.6/32012.4 MiB (20.1%)
Storage: 13.76 TiB (55.9% used) Procs: 433 Shell: bash 5.0.18 inxi: 3.0.32
$ → ffmpeg -v
ffmpeg version 4.1.6 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 8 (Debian 8.3.0-6)
configuration: --disable-decoder=amrnb --disable-decoder=libopenjpeg --disable-libopencv --disable-outdev=sdl2 --disable-podpages --disable-sndio --disable-stripping --enable-libaom --enable-avfilter --enable-avresample --enable-gcrypt --disable-gnutls --enable-openssl --enable-gpl --enable-libass --enable-libbluray --enable-libbs2b --enable-libcaca --enable-libcdio --enable-libcodec2 --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfontconfig --enable-libfreetype --enable-libfribidi --enable-libgme --enable-libgsm --enable-libilbc --enable-libkvazaar --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopenh264 --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libopenmpt --enable-libopus --enable-libpulse --enable-librubberband --enable-libshine --enable-libsnappy --enable-libsoxr --enable-libspeex --enable-libtesseract --enable-libtheora --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx265 --enable-libzimg --enable-libxvid --enable-libzvbi --enable-nonfree --enable-opencl --enable-opengl --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --enable-shared --enable-version3 --enable-libwebp --incdir=/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --prefix=/usr --toolchain=hardened --enable-frei0r --enable-chromaprint --enable-libx264 --enable-libiec61883 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-vaapi --enable-libmfx --enable-libvmaf --disable-altivec --shlibdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
libavutil 56. 22.100 / 56. 22.100
libavcodec 58. 35.100 / 58. 35.100
libavformat 58. 20.100 / 58. 20.100
libavdevice 58. 5.100 / 58. 5.100
libavfilter 7. 40.101 / 7. 40.101
libavresample 4. 0. 0 / 4. 0. 0
libswscale 5. 3.100 / 5. 3.100
libswresample 3. 3.100 / 3. 3.100
libpostproc 55. 3.100 / 55. 3.100
I have the free amdgpu drivers (not amdgpu-pro), but I activated OpenCL just in case.
I followed this tutorial.
$ → glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: AMD
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon RX550/550 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.40.0, 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.3.4
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.3.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.60
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 20.3.4
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20
OpenGL ES profile extensions:
$ → clinfo
Number of platforms 1
Platform Name Clover
Platform Vendor Mesa
Platform Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 20.3.4
Platform Profile FULL_PROFILE
Platform Extensions cl_khr_icd
Platform Extensions function suffix MESA
Platform Name Clover
Number of devices 1
Device Name Radeon RX550/550 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.40.0, 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
Device Vendor AMD
Device Vendor ID 0x1002
Device Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 20.3.4
Driver Version 20.3.4
Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.1
Device Type GPU
Device Profile FULL_PROFILE
Device Available Yes
Compiler Available Yes
Max compute units 8
Max clock frequency 1183MHz
Max work item dimensions 3
Max work item sizes 256x256x256
Max work group size 256
Preferred work group size multiple 64
Preferred / native vector sizes
char 16 / 16
short 8 / 8
int 4 / 4
long 2 / 2
half 0 / 0 (n/a)
float 4 / 4
double 2 / 2 (cl_khr_fp64)
Half-precision Floating-point support (n/a)
Single-precision Floating-point support (core)
Denormals No
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero No
Round to infinity No
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add No
Support is emulated in software No
Correctly-rounded divide and sqrt operations No
Double-precision Floating-point support (cl_khr_fp64)
Denormals Yes
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero Yes
Round to infinity Yes
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add Yes
Support is emulated in software No
Address bits 64, Little-Endian
Global memory size 3221225472 (3GiB)
Error Correction support No
Max memory allocation 1717986918 (1.6GiB)
Unified memory for Host and Device No
Minimum alignment for any data type 128 bytes
Alignment of base address 32768 bits (4096 bytes)
Global Memory cache type None
Image support No
Local memory type Local
Local memory size 32768 (32KiB)
Max number of constant args 16
Max constant buffer size 67108864 (64MiB)
Max size of kernel argument 1024
Queue properties
Out-of-order execution No
Profiling Yes
Profiling timer resolution 0ns
Execution capabilities
Run OpenCL kernels Yes
Run native kernels No
Device Extensions cl_khr_byte_addressable_store cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_int64_base_atomics cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics cl_khr_fp64
NULL platform behavior
clGetPlatformInfo(NULL, CL_PLATFORM_NAME, ...) Clover
clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, ...) Success [MESA]
clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [default] Success [MESA]
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_DEFAULT) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name Radeon RX550/550 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.40.0, 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name Radeon RX550/550 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.40.0, 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ACCELERATOR) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CUSTOM) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name Radeon RX550/550 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.40.0, 5.10.0-0.bpo.4-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
ICD loader properties
ICD loader Name OpenCL ICD Loader
ICD loader Vendor OCL Icd free software
ICD loader Version 2.2.12
ICD loader Profile OpenCL 2.2
This would not be a tearing problem, as no tearing is visible when playing videos and the TearFree driver policy is enabled.
$ → xrandr --verbose | grep TearFree
TearFree: on
TearFree: on
TearFree: on