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Nvidia's Shadowplay Is Always Watching You

Record your records.


Everybody is Let's Playing nowadays (I might even do it, you unlucky people) so the new frontier of development is in making the recording and playing back of gaming moments as easy as possible. The best solutions are those that will allow you to retroactively spot yourself being magnificent and then dump the previous moments. It saves you from starting conversations with "That one time..." and them re-enacting a game of Ricochet with condiments and plates. Nvidia's solution to this is ShadowPlay, a new feature of their Experience software suite that continually records the previous twenty minutes of your gaming, ready to be dumped to a file when you tell it to. There are some caveats, though.

It's free, but utilizes the on-board H.264 encoder built into GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series (I think the encoder that's used to steam to their handheld PC thingy, Shield), so you'll need some fairly decent and new cards to take advantage of it. Also, using it at maximum rendering will bring about a 5-10% performance hit, but those are tweakable stats. It claims you should get 1920x1080, at 60 frames per second, but in a reasonably-sized file. If you set out to make a video, rather than just reacting to your skills, the program can be set-up to record live as well. Nvidia are even looking towards streaming capabilities for a future update, with Twitch integration.

The program is out on Oct 28th. I might see if I can hunt down a new card and test it out.

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