I’ve tried Shadowplay on Batman Arkham Origins, Chivalry medieval warfare and ROME II so far. At 1080p, 60 FPS, “high settings” (50 mbps) I have ZERO performance hit. None whatsoever.
For those who don’t know, Shadow play utilizes the hardware h.264 encoder in GTX 600 and 700 series GPU’s to record high quality, 60 FPS, gameplay video.
You have a shadow mode which continually records up to 20 minuts of footage, but doesn’t save it until you press the save shadow key, at which point the buffer is saved to your hard drive. OF course you also have the traditional recording mode where you hit a key to start/stop recording, and that’s of course unlimited.
I want this, bad. I’ve been recording mostly with FRAPS which is really annoying. It caps your in-game frame rate to the recording framerate, and can produce noticibly stuttering gameplay. I tend not to run fraps too much when I’m doing something twitchy like infantry combat. It also creates giant output files, and because it degrades performance so much it’s not practical run in a constant buffer “record after something cool happens” mode.
Shadowplay is pretty much the perfect solution to what I’m looking for. It’d save me a lot of time recording videos (I could just save them after the fact when something interesting happened, instead of recording several minutes of footage for every interesting thing I want to save happens), and the lack of performance hit makes it practical to run constantly. I’ve wanted something like this since the moment I started recording videos.
I’ve been pretty firmly on the red team for a few years, and still, their price/performance ratios are much better currently. So I’d be giving up like 20-30% performance at the same price point in order to have shadow play. But given how much I like to record my gameplay, it would probably be worth it.
How is it in action? Is there a performance hit on high vs medium? (Smaller files with more compression may actually take longer to encode). How’s the quality on medium?
Never tried medium, but I’ll give it a shot. There is literally no impact that I can detect, except when running a frame counter, and then the impact is under 2 fps for me with no introduction of stutter to gameplay. So I don’t think there’s even a point of going medium quality unless file size is a concern.
Alright, I think I’m pretty sold. I may wait until Black Friday to buy a new card, not sure yet, but I’m probably going to get a 670.
How are your experiences with it? I know the measured frame rate drop is low (about 4%), but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Does it lead to any sort of stuttering or anything that otherwise makes it noticible? Basically, my question is this - if you didn’t have a frame rate counter running to detect the almost neglible frame rate drop, would you even know it was running? Or is it basically just a completely background process?
My experiences with Planetside 2, Rome 2, Wargame: ALB, Arkham City, Payday 2 and assorted others is that I’d never notice that Shadowplay was enabled without a framerate meter. I’ve got a GTX 660 Ti and only a 1680x1050 monitor, so the GPU isn’t exactly straining itself at any time, but still, it’s pretty silky. In Planetside’s case, I’m not sure I’d notice even when comparing FPS.
The stream-to-file “manual” mode is pretty much transparent on performance, and even dumping the running buffer (10 minutes => 3.7gb on High) to a file causes less of a burp than taking a Steam screenshot. I’ve never turned it to Medium; there’s not really any reason to. It records sound, too, although only your output, so if you want to catch outgoing you’ll need to loopback somehow.
I just leave it on all the time and dump neat things after the fact. It really is the bee’s knees. nVidia’s finally come up with a killer app.
That sounds great, but the audio thing is a pretty huge oversight. Every recording software has an option for a mic input - obviously there are times you want whatever you’re saying to make it into the video.
If it’s recording the final audio stream, and not just the game, I guess you could put on a headset and click the checkbox to play back your mic over your speakers. It’s distracting to hear yourself talk, but it should work to record your voice. Could anyone double check if that works?
Hopefully it’s an oversight that’ll be quickly corrected in a patch.
As far as medium goes, I just figured if even medium is a bitrate beyond what youtube would ever display, then the extra quality will be irrelevant and lower file sizes will result in less overhead, less disk access usage, and less disk space. But I’m not actually sure it it’s harder/longer to compress a video to a high compression, if that would somehow actually decrease performance. I guess if it’s all based on a hardware encoder, it probably doesn’t matter so long as it can stay real time at that bit rate.
Incidentally I’ve talked to a few people about shadowplay, even people who have shadowplay-capable cards, and no one seems that excited about it. Which I find out. They’ll say they don’t make videos, so why bother? But that’s the beauty of this - it takes almost zero effort. You don’t have to record lots of stuff and sort through it later to come up with a video. You just wait for something interesting to happen, you press a button, and it’s done. The most editing you’ll have to do is chop off the first X minutes before the interesting thing happens. Even people who typically don’t bother to make videos should think it’s cool to have unexpectedly funny/epic/whatever moments be recorded.
I hear ya, but most people aren’t playing the games to make recorded moments and the like. I know that when I finish a round of BF, I move right along and almost completely forget about it.
I guess that’s because I’ve always been a “lone wolf” in a lot of games I play and the amount of memory-making is pretty minimal. If we start having hilarious things happening in squad play, I could definitely appreciate its usefulness. I turned it on but I’ll have to tinker with it so I can actually utilize it.
It’s a great idea for those interested and it (seems) like it couldn’t be easier to use. I had it on last night and I no performance issues, but I never hit the key to save it.
The missing mic option is one of those things they plan to add later, along with Twitch streaming support and support for overlaying another video stream (likely your webcam).
It’s still in Beta, so some options are missing at this time, but they’re coming.
How’s the actual quality of the output video? I realize by the time you stick it on youtube the bitrate will be way down and the quality will take a huge nosedive. But do the output videos themselves look indistinguishable from gameplay? Or are they noticeably compressed?
I’ll give you a link to a file straight from shadowplay tonight when I get home. It’s hard for me to say because I play at 2560x1440 and the output is 1080p. It certainly looks very close to gameplay, specially with the 60 FPS going.
You won’t confuse the videos for actual gameplay. It’s obviously gone through lossy compression; edges are softer and bright colors are a little muted. It’s more DVD than Bluray, but with high framerate.
I think I have to get it. Last night I had a bunch of cool moments I wish I could’ve recorded, but they were low probability so I didn’t have fraps recording the whole time. We were playing BF4 and I was hanging outside the scout helicopter with an RPG out the window… We passed over one of the attack boats and I shot down at it and hit it directly in the back, killing a gunner and damaging the boat. Then the helicopter peeled off, so I made this longer range high deflection shot against the same target, and hit again - boom, the boat blows up with all the crew dead. Then after that in the same life, we made a high speed pass through some buildings and I made a perfect 2 bullet headshot against a guy, instantly killing him whipping past at 80 mph.
Of course I didn’t have fraps on, so I didn’t get any of that. That’s the sort of thing shadowplay would be perfect for. With fraps, I may not even have made those shots because the frame rate hit makes things so stuttering it’s hard to be precise, and then I’d basically have to record 30 times trying that for every time it worked, which means I end up recording 40+ minutes of video for a session and then I have to go back through it and find and save the good stuff. I mean, I did get stuff like this with fraps, but it’s too time consuming to record everything and go back later.
Incidentally, one feature that would massively fraps more useful and take 5 seconds to program would be to have separate buttons for “stop recording and save” and “stop recording and discard”, that way when you record 10 seconds because you think something cool might happen, and it doesn’t, you could immediately delete it rather than having to go through it later.
So the performance is as advertised. I can’t notice that it’s running, and even when you dump a full buffer to disk there’s no stuttering. It’s great. The quality on the video is noticibly lossy, but not bad. Certainly it’s way higher quality than it would be by the time it got to youtube anyway.
Something about the color palette seems off on the recorded videos. Like the whites or blacks or something just aren’t quite right. I can’t really pin down what the issue is, just something to do with the colors. Does anyone else get that feeling?
Will having a continuous 300MB/minute written to hard drives for hours at a time every day lead to early death for that drive?
For a spinning disk? No; streaming writes are very gentle on them.
SSDs are a bit of a different story. Most consumer-grade SSDs handle a maximum of around 10,000 writes over their whole surface, and in some cases are as low as 1,000 writes.
Modern wear-leveling techniques are enough to distribute the writes evenly even if you’re writing to the same file over and over, but it could still be a problem: for a 120 G drive, we have 120 GB * 1,000 / 0.3 GB/min = 400,000 min. If you play for 16 hours a day, that’s only a little over a year before your drive starts failing.
This is an extreme case: most SSDs have a larger write limit, and 120 GB is pretty small these days, and you probably aren’t playing 16 hours/day. It’s something to consider, though.
HDDs don’t degrade due to writes. SSDs will, but you could write 300MB/minute all day everyday and it’d still take many years before you noticed a decrease in usable capacity.
40000 Kbit/sec seems like a crazy data rate for something that still appears lossy though. I guess it makes all the difference in screen-changing action scenes though, like pretty much any FPS.
