Pages

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

[Rant] NVidia Shadow Play, here I come!

Finally NVidia is releasing ShadowPlay to the public. If you don’t know, ShadowPlay is the technology where you can record your gameplay videos using the hardware encoder inside the GeForce 600/700 graphics cards. What’s cool about that is, you will hardly see a performance penalty when you do that. I had been using MSI Afterburner for video capture and while it is better than FRAPS as if doesn’t lock the gaming FPS to 60 or 120FPS, it still comes with a 10-15% performance hit because all the processing is done in real time in the CPU.

2013-10-28_23-26-26

ShadowPlay comes with the version 1.7 of GeForce Experience software. GeForce Experience was originally created to automatically suggest the optimal graphics settings for your system to play the games that are installed in your system. I usually tweak the graphics settings on my own, but if you are a causal user, you will find this software to be very helpful. Of course, if you want to get the best FPS for your multiplayer games, you will have to come up with your own settings.

NVIDIA_GeForce_Experience_2013-10-28_23-34-55

ShadowPlay is still in beta. You also need to update your graphics driver to 331.65 beta driver as well. After you download and install both GeForce Experience 1.7 and graphics driver version 331.65 beta, you will have to din to the Preferences tab on GeForce Experience to enable ShadowPlay. To enable ShadowPlay, you have to click on the button called “ShadowPlay”. Then you have to turn on the switch on the left hand side. Your monitor would go black and do some weird stuff when you click on that button. Don’t worry; just give it about 10 seconds.

 NVIDIA_GeForce_Experience_-_ShadowPlay_(BETA)_2013-10-28_23-34-50

There are indeed limitations in ShadowPlay. The biggest limitation is that you can only record maximum 20 minutes at a time. Plus, you can record only at 1080p 60Hz. At best quality settings, you will end up with a 7.5GB file at those settings.

Even though NVidia said that you would be able to stream games to Twitch, there doesn’t seem to be inbuilt support in GeForce Experience at this time. But hopefully it will come in the final version. For now, you will have to be satisfied with Afterburner or FRAPS like recording and manually uploading the video files to YouTube. Of course you will have to do some preprocessing because 7.5GB sounds very big.

Ok, enough chitter chatter. I need to experience this. See ya later!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...