Shadowplay.
Shadowplay.
I think ShadowPlay is the best... because it's really easy to use, you can stream directly to twitch with it and the impact on performance is minimal while still having a pretty good quality. But I don't think it supports 1080p streaming if that's what you are aiming for... or I don't know how to enable it :P
I'm still waiting for a valid suggestion other than fraps for those who cannot use ShadowPlay because they bought their graphics card a few months too early. My how time flies.
Your rights as a consumer begin and end at the point where you choose not to consume, and not where you yourself influence the consumed goods.
Translation: if you don't like a game don't play it.
Best software for recording depends entirely on what it's needed for.
OBS (or Shadowplay) is fine if it's for simple streaming at low quality, fraps is necessary if you want to edit it further and make it look pro level quality. I used to use fraps always but no longer bothering with it after youtube lowered quality of 1080p gaming videos.
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It would've been mostly academic discussion only month ago before youtube allowed 60fps video. Still pretty much non-issue with WoW because you wont ever see 60fps anyway with settings high enough.
I'm a big fan of Dxtory. It is highly configurable and has some great options. You can change video codecs, encoding, record multiple audio streams (rather than all mixed together), and it can record files to multiple hdds without RAID and reassemble them later.
On the con side, it's not free, isn't as user friendly, and English isn't the author's main language.
This is an unelegant workaround where you have to set 1 client as portable so you can launch 2 instances of OBS. The fact you have to open 2 to even do that is proof enough it doesn't support it on it's own. The devs of OBS have already said that the next version of OBS will include built-in functions for separate bitrate record and stream.
Since this thread popped up again I'll amend some things I said before now that I have recent experience with Shadowplay.
- Desktop recording has some issues with resolution when monitors have different resolutions, but most of the time it works great.
- Quality is totally awesome at default settings (16Mbps), there's hardly any macroblocking even at 1440p.
- Retarded variable framerate and fractional FPS (59.94fps instead of true 60) makes it completely useless piece of shit for people who want to edit stuff or combine material from several sources. In current form it's semi-usable for people who just want to quickly youtube something nobody will ever watch or stream twitch 24/7, but it's crap for anything more ambitious than that.
Seems like OBS is the way to go even though it has notably lower visual quality.
DXtory with lagarith encoder is the best quality performance to get so far in my experience when wanting to game at 60 + FPS, but with high quality recordings, you really gonna have to start to invest a bit.
These are quite big files, a 10 min file recorded at 2560x1080 30 fps capture is around 34 GB, and remember, thats just the 1 file, a 2-3 hour nights recording of attempts etc I use upto around 300-400 GB on the HDD.
my set up as follows
I 3570 k at 4.3 GHZ
1 SSD where my frequently played games are
1 WD blue 1 TB with other games are
1 WD blue 1 TB which is only for raw footage only.
1 WD 2 TB green drive to store the rendered files plus other data.
I do game at 60 FPS by the way, the games are just recorded at 30 FPS as my cpu most likely cant cope to record that at 60 FPS, however, it saves a bit of space and youtube will render at 30 fps anyways.
From here, as you have a high quality footage, you want to take it into a editting or redering software, Im using sony movie studio 12;
main concept avc and modified the internet 1080 template with deblocking on, 30 fps at 50 mb/s or something like that constant bit rate.
As I am using a 21:9 monitor and captured footage at this res and AR, since I game at fullscreen which is advisable when recording at high bit rate, I have to crop the footage to 16:9 1920x1080 to make it youtube friendly.
The same file 10 min file with cuda assist took me around 40-50 mins to render with nothing else added in, depends on the area of the game, sometimes it needs brightening.
Ive used frap, bandicam and shadowplay, bandicam is flexible, but Ive noticed a recent stuttering issue lately no matter the encoder, shadowplay just isnt good enough quality.
Now fraps does have the best quality no questions asked here and also smoothest footage and oddly enough, even with frame drops from 60, and rendering at the same render settings for 30 FPS, it still smooth all the way, but I prefer to make sure I can play at 60 FPS so this ruled out fraps for me.