[Rant] Live streaming to Twitch

Now that NVidia has released a version of GeForce Experience that allows us to stream gameplay videos straight to Twitch, I had been playing around with it.

Click here to visit my Twitch channel. I hope you'd subscribe. ^^

 

The day before yesterday I live streamed NFS Rivals, which I deleted because it was a crappy gameplay videos. Last night I recorded Crysis 3 which turned out to be quite nice. I still don't record the audio from the mic.

 

I am still experimenting because this is completely a new thing to me. It seems that you can upload the gameplay videos to YouTube fraught from Twitch but I still don't know how to. I have connected with YouTube from Twitch settings but I think I need to explicitly tell it to upload the videos to YouTube.

 

One more thing. GeForce Experience doesn't seem to save the Twitch account credentials. I have to enter them every time I reboot. Every time I try to do a live stream, I get a crossed indicator that shows as if it is not working. When I checked the ShadowPlay settings, it was not logged into my Twitch account.

 

# Fount it. You will receive an email when you can save the Twitch broadcasts.  From there, you have to first save the video in Twitch and then explicitly ask it to upload to YouTube.

 

Here’s one of the videos that I uploaded through Twitch to YouTube. (Hey, while at it, why don’t you subscribe to my YouTube channel as well?)

Crysis 3 MP TDM on Williamsburg

 

What about the performance? There is definitely a lag between the upstream and the downstream. If you checked out the archived videos you’ll see me turning to the left of me. That is to check if the stream is working on my laptop. It was a bit laggy on the MacBook Air, so I lowered the quality to “low” setting in GeForce Experience. Hey, a lot of Sri Lankans cannot watch the videos because of the darn caps imposed by SLT. What a retarded ISP!!!

 

Anyways, I will continue to live stream videos to Twitch, and later archive them to YouTube. It seems easier than saving, editing and manually uploading to YouTube.

[Rant] Twitch streaming finally comes to Geforce Experience

Guess what popped up when I turned on the PC. New update for NVidia GeForce Experience application. What was the update about? Twitch streaming. Now you can directly stream videos to Twitch - free of charge and free of performance penalty - if you have a qualified NVidia graphics card. 

This is where you enable Twitch streaming. The default shortcut keys to activate streaming is ALT + F8.

I had a Twitch account which had never been used before and I logged into it. 

You can record audio from mic and show yourself from the webcam overlay. But for now, I disabled both. 

Then I launched NFS Rivals and tried to stream a gameplay video. It seemed to have worked, but I didn't check it while I was streaming. I had not enabled the option where you can save your recordings for a while, so that video wasn't saved.

So I don't know if it really worked. All I did was press ALT + F8 while playing the game and an indicator showed up in the usually place. That's all I know. 

Will try back when I get back home from work and report back. Hold on tight!

[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!

NVidia finally releases a fix for the broken 320.18 WHQL drivers

NVidia released the GeForce 320.18 WHQL drivers with the release of GTX780. But in the past people in the forums started talking that these drivers were crap and breaking the GPUs. They were getting lockups, BSODs, micro-stuttering, rendering artifacts and all sorts of stability issues. I also noticed some micro-stuttering, but luckily not anything else.

Seems like NVidia concurred and they have finally released a new driver that fixes these issues. It’s the 320.49 beta. Yes, it is a beta driver after all. They didn’t release this driver just to fix the issues of 320.18 driver, but because they just released their new midrange king, the GTX760. Luckily, it is slightly slower than a GTX670, but way cheaper. Only $250. (Read a review here)NVidia is really messing with the prices. Their enthusiast cards are way too expensive and their midrange to high-end cards are way cheap. It’s not my loss. I am not looking to upgrade my graphics card anyways. I only play one game and that’s Crysis 3 and I can just do fine with my existing card.

OK, I digress. You can download the 320.49 beta driver from GeForce Experience software. That’s what I always do. I download it and then launch the installer as custom install and then uncheck everything other than the driver (you cannot check or uncheck it) and PhysX driver. Everything else is just bloat. I don’t usually do a clean install, because for some reason it messes with the Creative X-Fi drivers.

Or if you are still too lazy to download GeForce Experience, you can download the new drivers from the following links

• Windows Vista, 7, 8: 32bit driver,  64bit driver
• Windows XP: 32bit driver, 64bit driver

NVidia GeForce Experience (1.0.1.0) beta finally opens to the public

In a previous article, I talked about this cool tool from NVidia that helps their customers – the gamers – to quickly set the graphics settings of the games to best match their graphics card’s capabilities. It was in closed beta back then. Today, NVidia announced the open beta to the public. Time to feast, my fellow NVidia gamers.

You can download it from the following link. Download GeForce Experience 1.0.1.0

The UI is unchanged from the previous closed beta. But I noticed one change. It now supports Far Cry 3.