Wanting to record in-game

[Heroic955]

Hey guys, I'm wanting to record while in-game in BattleField 4, but I'm not sure I have the right juice or that I have a program to record with.

Here are my specs:
MSI GTX660 OC TF 2gb
Intel i7-3770 oc'd 10 4.1ghz
8gb 1886mhz ram
500gb WD Black HD 7200rpm
Corsair H100i Liquid cooling system

What program should I use to record with and how would I get it?

Thanks guys!

[Mokona512]

You have a GTX 660, use shadow play, it for the most part has no notable performance impact, and for the more demanding games, the performance drop may be around 2FPS.

It should come with the latest nvidia drivers. It uses the built in h.264 encoder in the GPU to capture and save the footage right from the frame buffer, so other than basic IO requirements, the application has an extremely low CPU usage.



it will also broadcast to twitch, or constantly record all gameplay and save the last 1-20 minutes (you can select) of gameplay once you press a hotkey.

[John Ram'Bow]

I have yet to test this but i will soon. iv been recommended this for game recording https://obsproject.com/ was told it works well with little impact on pc during gameplay as well.

[Heroic955]

Thanks guys, I'll give shadow play a try.

John, let me know how that goes please!

[Heroic955]

Hmmm, I seem to have all the requirements filled, but whenever try to start shadowplay it just reverts back to the original screen as if I just opened it. It doesn't light up all green like I've seen from other people's screen shots. I'm reinstalling geforce experience right now and will see if that works.

[Heroic955]

Sorry for the post spamming, but reinstalling did work, now to try it in game.

[Mokona512]

Wanted to also add, shadowplay only works when game is in full screen mode.

[Heroic955]

Even though i am in Full screen mode it still won't let me record. No idea...

[Tzamen]

Use *cough* fraps and virtualdub+codec to compress.

[Heroic955]

I think I'll go that route...what's virtualdub used for?

[Symthic]

OBS is mainly used for streaming and I wouldn't recommend it for recording videos because the codec it uses isn't the best. I personally use Dxtory along with the lagarith lossless codec to record. It has fairly low impact on performance and the file sizes aren't too large, but I would definitely try to get shadowplay working as the files are tiny and there's virtually no impact on performance. If you decide to go with Dxtory, keep in mind that it costs money so you'll have to shell out $35 or torrent it, and yes, you read that right. $35. Pretty expensive, I know. I'd personally stay away from Fraps because it has a very large performance hit and also creates pretty large files, however, I haven't used Fraps in a long time and recent updates might have fixed this. Virtualdub, from what I can tell with a quick Google search, is a video processing application that can compress video files. Basically, it makes the size of your video file much smaller while keeping good quality, so that fixes part of my issues with Fraps, but you'll still have a big performance hit.

[Mokona512]

For any recording application, if it relies on the CPU to process the image data or encode, then it will impact the performance. Even if you do a raw capture where there is no encoding involved during the recording process, the CPU will still be tied up capturing the video from the buffer, then writing it to the hard drive.

With applications such as shadowplay where it can access the frame buffer directly, and then use a built in h.264 encoder to convert the video on the fly, and then only leaving the CPU to worry about writing around 50mbit/s at the most, then there will be a much smaller overhead.

with non GPU recording methods, the capture process will force the CPU to deal with nearly 125MB/s worth of data for a 1080p 60FPS capture, and nearly 250MB/s if you want an exact 1-1 quality copy from the frame buffer.

Programs like openbroadcaster and probably many others, will now work on offloading the encoding process which is the most CPU intensive part. By having the GPU do it, they often will not have the access needed to send data directly from the frame buffer to the GPU's built in encoder, before sending that data through the PCI-e bus.

With a fast CPU with 4+ cores, the processing of 125MB/s worth of data may not be much of an issue, especially if the game is not CPU intensive, but if you have a game that is heavily CPU bottlenecked, then any added CPU overhead will significantly impact performance.

[Ty3sa]

I use OBS and can teach you how to use it

[Heroic955]

Thanks for the help guys, I finally got Shadowplay to work on my system. I have it set at 30fps, but I'm finding that's too choppy at times. Would taking it to 48 or 60fps make too much of a performance impact?

[Damnation]

The easiest way to see how much of an impact it has is to try it out for awhile, however if you plan on putting them on youtube they still have a 30fps limit so it will be choppy again after they process it.

OBS, FFSplit (same as obs) are good options, but shadow play should be much better. I can't try it out :/



Just for refrence, a data rate of 20Mbit/sec will put you at about 150 Megabytes/minute of recording. I don't know what you have on that drive but you may have to stay on top of the video collection.

[Mokona512]

a new version of shadowplay was released with improved compatibility when used with the latest drivers.