GeForce ShadowPlay


Recommended Posts

This is just to give the heads-up on the new feature that's been included in the latest Nvidia Drivers package. I've thought it's nice of Nvidia to offer it and I'm sure someone will find a good use for it :)

 

? GeForce? ShadowPlay? (Beta)
 
? Fast, easy, and free game recording
? Shadow Mode records up to the last 20 minutes of your game play 
? Manual Mode records unlimited footage 
? High-quality, hardware-accelerated H.264 recording at 1080p
? GeForce GTX? 650 or higher GPU required
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mobile users can get this too, with a commandline parameter:

 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe" -shadowplay


Tested on 770M with SC2, D3, seems to work just fine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Action! and Bandicam also support NVCUVID encoding, plus they support Intel QuickSync, and in Bandicam's case, AMD's hardware-accelerated encoder. It's nice that this is free for NVIDIA users though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have been benchmarking but analysis and comparison between alternatives takes some time to get right. Why would anybody switch from dxtory (that looks dramatically better) if performance is only 5% better?

dxtory only supports software encoding. This is fine if you want to record in lossless quality, but for lossy capture using x264 is prohibitive at any kind of decent resolution. I'm not a big fan of lossy capture but I can see the use if you just want to upload a gameplay moment to Youtube without commentary or further editing. If the perf penalty is sufficiently low, one might just leave ShadowPlay on at all times which isn't really an option for software encoders (either you run out of disk space quickly or you murder your CPU).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fraps codec is lossless, by default it's 4:2:0 YUV but it can also do RGB24. Capturing totally uncompressed isn't really feasible unless you're using multiple drives in raid or SSDs - 1080p@30fps would be about 180MB/s - and there's no point since lossless codecs are fast and very effective. I guess we agree on this point but there seemed to be contradicting statements about that in your post.

 

Also, not sure what you're referring to when talking about workflow with Lagarith - in my experience it's as straightforward as Fraps, Action's FCIV or any similar lossless codec. Using a lossy format like H264, now that's a pain to work with - stepping backwards in an editor is extremely slow for instance. That's why my stance on capturing directly to H264 is that it's appropriate for streaming or if you don't intend to edit anything before uploading; otherwise you want to be using a lossless codec. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

too bad this is only supported by Desktop GPU's :(

 

I have 2 GT650M graphics cards in my laptop but neither of them are supported.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

By default FRAPs does lossy RGB, you can toggle that off. Even with 'force lossless RGB' it's still doing something wrong: color is terrible. I'm not advocating for fraps: the performance characteristics just aren't there.

When I get home I'll do the FRAPs quality comparison: whatever it's doing, something is very wrong. If you can see a problem with my configuration I'll fix it and re-test.

Hm, never had color issues with Fraps, and I used it for a variety of games, so I'd be curious to see the issues you're having. I know the performance isn't up there with some of the newer screen recorders, but I mostly recorded older games so that didn't matter.

 

I'm intrigued that you advocate uncompressed recording; that's a crazy amount of space. You really need tons (and I mean terabytes) of defragmented free space to sustain that for long gameplay sessions. Lossless compression (say, Lagarith or FCIV) is so efficient with so little CPU cost, I can't see why you'd not use that. Is the framerate difference really significant?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Minor update: while I could reproduce my FRAPs colour issue on an older version (3.5.4) it's solved in the current one so I withdraw my claim about it screwing up even when force is lossless RGB enabled. It seems like it was a bug that was patched a year ago, I didn't notice because I don't exactly keep fraps up to date. Pulling down the current version (3.5.99 b 15618) fixes the issue - possibly older ones too.

Yes, I see a perfectly black picture using the method you described (using Civ5 which also creates tga files). Kinda stumped that Lagarith would not produce equally perfect results - it's a lossless codec! It does operate in RGB24 space; perhaps DXTory uses it in YUY2 or YV12?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.