Recording quality with Shadowplay / GeForce Share

[anon5123]

So I just updated GeForce Experience to the latest version, and the new Shadowplay (or "Share" as they're calling it now) seems to actually work this time, whereas in the past it wouldn't even detect games and I could only record by recording the desktop.

While it does record just fine, the quality is a bit iffy and I can't seem to change it. All it has for settings is a bitrate slider, and no matter what I set it to, the resulting video looks exactly the same. I recorded with the slider set to 20, and then again with it set to 100, put the two videos side-by-side...no difference at all. There was only 1.6mb in difference between the files as well, despite a 500% increase in bitrate.

Is there any way to increase the quality of Shadowplay recordings? I did a bit of YouTube searching and did come across videos that claimed to be Shadowplay recordings, and they looked great, but anything I record in WoW comes out looking very noticeably fuzzy and blurry.

Example:



It's decent quality, but still looks noticeably blurry. It seems like the quality is more geared towards streaming, which I have no intention of doing.

System specs, if applicable:

3.5 GHz quad-core i5
EVGA GTX 970
8GB DDR3 RAM

[Remilia]

Nope! You can't really do much about it. Their implementation of the x264 compression was pretty meh at best. Light weight but meh. That said a screenshot is technically lossless (provided you save it as a lossless format) vs a compressed video.
Honestly speaking, while hardware encoder (Intel/AMD/Nvidia encoders) give less of an impact to performance, a pure software solution, while more taxing, will tend to yield better results. Use FRAPs lossless then processing or some Dxtory set up is better quality wise but more taxing.

[Captain Fizz]

OBShttps://obsproject.com/ seems to get rave reviews and is free.

I may be using it in future... It does local recording too.

[Arbiter]

OBS is definitely an option for setting up your videos tailored for yourself.

But just a suggestion...I'm not home so I can't verify if it's possible anymore. Try turning the resolution to 4K with the bit rate maxed out. You can always convert it to 1080p in your editing software. Should increase the quality of the footage. It will require more space on the drive though before you convert it to 1080p. Just a heads up.

[anon5123]

OBS is definitely an option for setting up your videos tailored for yourself.

But just a suggestion...I'm not home so I can't verify if it's possible anymore. Try turning the resolution to 4K with the bit rate maxed out. You can always convert it to 1080p in your editing software. Should increase the quality of the footage. It will require more space on the drive though before you convert it to 1080p. Just a heads up.

I tried turning it to 4k and setting the bitrate slider to max, but that didn't seem to make a difference. Was still noticeably fuzzy and blurry. Disk space isn't an issue; I've got 300gb free on my external hard drive, and even at that 4k resolution with 130 bitrate, it was only 300mb per minute or so.

I guess I'll try that OBS program.

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Tried out OBS, and it does seem to record in noticeably higher quality, without the filesize being too large. (2 min video was ~260mb)

However, when playing the video back, it often gets really choppy, even though the ingame FPS meter stays around 60 the whole time. Any way to fix that? I know that the drive you're recording to can often cause issues like this, but I'm not sure if it's the problem. WoW and Windows and OBS are running on an SSD, and I'm recording to a separate external hard drive, which is using USB 3.0.

Looking over the video, it seems like whenever the camera is moving, the video gets really choppy, but when the camera is still, everything is super smooth.

I tried both Fraps and Dxtory, and they both had issues as well. Fraps, while having great quality, would drop my FPS down really low and had massive filesize. Dxtory was only decent quality, but would record at absolute shit fps (like 5-10fps) and still had massive filesizes.

I guess I'll just stick with Shadowplay and deal with the slight reduction in quality.

[Arbiter]

I tried turning it to 4k and setting the bitrate slider to max, but that didn't seem to make a difference. Was still noticeably fuzzy and blurry. Disk space isn't an issue; I've got 300gb free on my external hard drive, and even at that 4k resolution with 130 bitrate, it was only 300mb per minute or so.

I guess I'll try that OBS program.

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Tried out OBS, and it does seem to record in noticeably higher quality, without the filesize being too large. (2 min video was ~260mb)

However, when playing the video back, it often gets really choppy, even though the ingame FPS meter stays around 60 the whole time. Any way to fix that? I know that the drive you're recording to can often cause issues like this, but I'm not sure if it's the problem. WoW and Windows and OBS are running on an SSD, and I'm recording to a separate external hard drive, which is using USB 3.0.

Looking over the video, it seems like whenever the camera is moving, the video gets really choppy, but when the camera is still, everything is super smooth.

I tried both Fraps and Dxtory, and they both had issues as well. Fraps, while having great quality, would drop my FPS down really low and had massive filesize. Dxtory was only decent quality, but would record at absolute shit fps (like 5-10fps) and still had massive filesizes.

I guess I'll just stick with Shadowplay and deal with the slight reduction in quality.

Something definitely doesn't seem right. 4K at max bit rate should have been double that on average.

I'm not sure about the choppy video though for the other options. I'd suggest googling for some optimal settings to use and see if it remains.

[anon5123]

Something definitely doesn't seem right. 4K at max bit rate should have been double that on average.

Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on. I re-recorded a short clip in both 1080p at 100 bit rate, and 4k at 130 bit rate, and then stretched my video player over the WoW window and alt-tabbed between them. The quality is okay, but I didn't notice any difference between the 1080p and the 4k clip. They both had the same exact quality.

Just to be thorough, I tried restarting the WoW client after switching to 4k again, but that didn't seem to make any noticeable difference.

Overall, Shadowplay seems to be the best option. It has the best quality without having a massive lossless filesize, it doesn't lag or get choppy when I move the camera, and it doesn't make my FPS drop way down.

I'm not sure about the choppy video though for the other options. I'd suggest googling for some optimal settings to use and see if it remains.

Choppy video was only happening with OBS, and only when I was moving, or moving the camera. When I was standing still and keeping the camera still, the recording was fine.

[Remilia]

Tried out OBS, and it does seem to record in noticeably higher quality, without the filesize being too large. (2 min video was ~260mb)

However, when playing the video back, it often gets really choppy, even though the ingame FPS meter stays around 60 the whole time. Any way to fix that? I know that the drive you're recording to can often cause issues like this, but I'm not sure if it's the problem. WoW and Windows and OBS are running on an SSD, and I'm recording to a separate external hard drive, which is using USB 3.0.

Looking over the video, it seems like whenever the camera is moving, the video gets really choppy, but when the camera is still, everything is super smooth.

I tried both Fraps and Dxtory, and they both had issues as well. Fraps, while having great quality, would drop my FPS down really low and had massive filesize. Dxtory was only decent quality, but would record at absolute shit fps (like 5-10fps) and still had massive filesizes.

I guess I'll just stick with Shadowplay and deal with the slight reduction in quality.

Issue comes into play is your CPU afterwards. Since you're no longer using any hardware accelerated encoding, it's now entirely reliant on the CPU and the higher the bit rate of course higher the load on the CPU is. The stuttery is something I notice when I was on an i7-2600 with multiple games up before swapping to an i7-5820k. I personally actually use OBS to record but it's not the best quality but it is way better than NVEnc and I have the CPU power to go waste, but that's really dependent on user to user configuration.

What is your CPU, exact model and if you can overclock the thing.

Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on. I re-recorded a short clip in both 1080p at 100 bit rate, and 4k at 130 bit rate, and then stretched my video player over the WoW window and alt-tabbed between them. The quality is okay, but I didn't notice any difference between the 1080p and the 4k clip. They both had the same exact quality.

Just to be thorough, I tried restarting the WoW client after switching to 4k again, but that didn't seem to make any noticeable difference.

Overall, Shadowplay seems to be the best option. It has the best quality without having a massive lossless filesize, it doesn't lag or get choppy when I move the camera, and it doesn't make my FPS drop way down.

As for not much quality increase, that's because the bit rate isn't that much different relatively speaking. The resolution and bit rate are different matters. Higher resolution doesn't mean it looks better, in fact for the same quality from lower to higher resolution the bit rate needs to scale proportional to the increase in resolution. This is with the assumption you're viewing it at the native resolution and not blowing it up to fit the screen.

[anon5123]

What is your CPU, exact model and if you can overclock the thing

It's an i5-4690k

I don't really want to fuck around with overclocking unless I really need to for a game or something.

[Remilia]

It's an i5-4690k

I don't really want to fuck around with overclocking unless I really need to for a game or something.

Outside of CPU upgrading it's pretty much the only option in terms of increasing CPU performance.

It's not actually a huge risk provided you're not upping the voltage, upping voltage is where there's an actual risk to the CPU where as if you don't you'd just crash if you go too high of a frequency.

[Lathais]

It's an i5-4690k

I don't really want to fuck around with overclocking unless I really need to for a game or something.

OCing the 4690k is a piece of cake and will make a noticeable difference in your recording or streaming. It certainly did for me when I was doing a bit of streaming.

[anon5123]

OCing the 4690k is a piece of cake and will make a noticeable difference in your recording or streaming. It certainly did for me when I was doing a bit of streaming.

Well, I don't do any streaming at all, and recording with Shadowplay works just fine.

That and, I'm using the stock cooling fan, so if I were to overclock, I'd need to buy a new fan as well.

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Yeah, I think this quality is good enough. I'll stick with Shadowplay.