[Rant] GeForce Experience version 1.8 comes out

And it gets rid of restrictions a lot of people had with ShadowPlay. You'll need a GeForce 600 series or newer graphics card to use the Shadow Play terminology.

You can download it from this link.

[Rant] NVidia Shadow Play is pretty sweet

28th of October was a great day. NVidia released the beta version of one of the most anticipated features of their platform: ShadowPlay game play recording.

Yes, just like they said that it doesn't come with a performance hit (or at least, a noticeable one), it indeed performed as expected. However, at first, things got a bit screwy. It didn't work for me at first. I tried recording Crysis 3 on the day ShadowPlay was released. It just didn't work. But after fully uninstalling and re-installing the drivers as well as GeForce Experience software, I managed to get it to work.

Here's one of my recordings. Too bad I had to dumb down the quality to upload it to YouTube. The quality of the original file was very good though.

There are few issues with ShadowPlay and few things that I would like to see in the final version or the updates to come in the future. The issue is, when switching from a game to the desktop, it takes a lot longer than normal for the desktop to appear and vice versa. Windows 8 is already much slower than Windows 7 in that department, and ShadowPlay makes it much worse. 

It once crashed the display driver and the game when I tried to switch between the game and the desktop. I guess that's why it is still a beta. 

Currently, ShadowPlay only supports 16:9 aspect ratio (perhaps only 1080p? not sure). So if you have a display with 16:10 aspect ratio like the 1200p or 1600p ones, you will not get a get a very good recording. And it would be great if you could mix an audio input from the mic as well into the recording. That would make commentary much easier.

[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.

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.

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.

 

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!

GeForce 700 series is seemingly coming in 2014

Most people were hoping to see the next generation of graphics cards from both AMD and NVidia within this year because it has already been more than a year since both companies released their current generation cards. Even if they launched the new cards towards the end of this year, it would still conform to the usual 18 month product cycle. But few weeks ago AMD said that they are not going to release the 8000 series this year because they are in the opinion that if they did a rush up job, people would crucify them for releasing a new product without a significant increase in performance over the current generation. Things would get even worse because NVidia's next generation architecture seems to bump up the performance significantly - at least performance to watt ratio wise.

Today Tom's Hardware reports that NVidia is also delaying their next generation to next year for some unknown reason. Both of these companies don't really need to release new cards because the current generation is more than competent enough to tackle the games available today. Unless 2560x1440 resolution becomes mainstream - which is unlikely to happen anytime soon - there is no need for more power in the "sanity circle" (i.e. mainstream segment) But there are people with 2560x1440 screens and triple display setups and they really need the future horse power today. But for those people, there's something called SLI and Crossfire, if you haven't already heard.

Even though you can combine multiple graphics cards and make then work together to gain a boost over a single card, AMD has a problem with their design. Ryan Shrout at PCPer.com has recently found out that AMD's multi GPU solution does not deliver better performance than a single card in many of the games out there. The cards do their work but the frames are not properly spread out to give the fluidity and that 2nd card's work is not perceived by human eye. The fix is not a simple driver fix but they'll probably find a temporary solution for this problem in the coming days. NVidia has a mechanism in hardware to tackle this problem so NVidia does not have this problem. I'm sure the HD8000 series is already past its design phase and they cannot use the same trick as what NVidia is doing in the HD8000 series. AMD will have to find a way to fix this probe in the driver or they would lose performance in the enthusiast segment who uses multiple high-end cards in their rigs.

Back on to the topic. Are you really mad that the next generation cards are delayed? If you are building a new PC, maybe you are. But if you already own a high-end card like the GTX670/680/690/Titan or HD7950/7970, you should be happy that $400~$1000 card won't be outdated for another year, right? I am glad that mine isn't getting outdated soon. It's not that I have to upgrade even if they released the new generation. I don't play a lot of games. Right now I only play Crysis 3 and nothing else. If I disable AA, I can get 60fps in it, so there isn't really a need to get a newer card. But there is the upgrade itch. When that happens, there is no going back.

So all in all, I'm glad that newer cards aren't right around the corner. I probably can spend that money on the Haswell upgrade if my wife doesn't have any fancy plans.