'The key to ShadowPlay is that it uses the built-in H.264 encoder that we have built in on all our GPUs to help with recording gameplay. NVidia phrased it best in their press conference: Playing Shootmania, for instance, I'd be able to wait until I've had a major killstreak to save the file, then dump the useless footage that shows my limitless prior failed attempts at playing properly. I'll outline the most obvious use-case scenario of this tech, if you haven't already figured it out: Rather than recording all of your gameplay - which undoubtedly includes boring deaths, loading, or wandering - you can let ShadowPlay run silently, then instruct it to only save after you've just done something spectacular.

Undesired footage is dumped as it falls out of the user-designated timeframe. This reduces overall performance tie-ups and reduces storage utilization to near-zero (files are only stored to disk once a hotkey is hit), but still offers the potential to capture key gaming moments. With Shadow mode, however, things are a bit different: ShadowPlay will run in the background and capture gameplay silently, but won't save the file unless otherwise instructed by the user.

Users can configure ShadowPlay to automatically capture up to 20 minutes of footage in either 'Shadow mode' or 'manual mode,' with manual mode performing similar to existing video capture tech (hit the button and it records). NVidia's ShadowPlay software can capture gameplay video at a maximum resolution of 1080p (plans for more) at 30FPS, using the card-optimized, Kepler-integrated H.264 encoder. Still, even Fraps can't record the past - and even Fraps has a fairly significant hit to performance, especially disk IO given its raw footage capture. NVidia ShadowPlay: Retroactive Gameplay Capture Softwareįraps is probably the longest-standing video capture technology available to gamers, and given its frametime analysis and benchmarking options, it's become an important tool to nearly all video card reviews.

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