Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers access Donna and today we are talking about three utilities that are for capturing your gameplay moments those tools are fraps which you have likely heard of GVR which is somewhat new and Nvidia shadowplay let's talk about what these three tools are then we'll look at benchmark results in terms of which one performs better for your video card and talk about storage requirements fraps is the oldest spend around for about 10 years GPR is somewhat new it is built and supported by rafter but is heavily supported by AMD Nvidia shadowplay is one year old as of May and is as far as I know the first utility on the PC side to introduce retroactive recording GVR is also able to do this so the three tools what are the pros and cons well fraps record is almost entirely on the CPU side meaning that your system will be bound by the CPU it does a little on the GPU but not much and it's going to slam your FPS throughput in any game you're playing sometimes up to 50 percent or more which means that you're going to need to drop settings if you'd like to record gameplay with fraps and not have huge FPS spikes that is because it is more CPU bound than the others and these GB are and Nvidia's shadowplay or I should say Raptors GB are are both utilities that use the GPU to record the GPU is a parallel processor unlike the CPU serial processing and it also is specialized for video capture and video output so it's going to have an inherent advantage when you couple a GPU with software that's built to use it Nvidia and AMD both have GPUs post 7900 series and post Fermi meaning Kepler Maxwell which would be 600 onward for NVIDIA their GPUs in the series and onward use what is called an encoder and h.264 video encoder AMD calls it VCE it's a video codec compliance and NVIDIA just calls it an h.264 encoder because that's what it is and this is a special subset of the die the GPU die that it's only purpose in life is to encode capture deal with scale whatever you're doing h.264 video playback which is exactly what the capture is for games and it's supposed to do that in an isolated fashion from the rest of the GPU meaning that your games will not actually have a huge FPS impact in theory because all of this recording is being handled by a special little processor in its own corner of the GPU that should have no impact on gaming of course nothing is a perfect system right there's always some loss and we'll look at that in a moment fraps does it all in the cpu and suffers as a result and also does not do any live encoding it only records losslessly in a raw format which means that you end up with videos I'm not kidding that I have about a 638 megabits per second bitrate versus the 50 megabits per second adjustable of the Andy and add video solutions and I talked about this in the article length of the description below if you are curious how this is calculated and what it means in short this video is about 20 18 to 20 megabits per second played in 1080p for a second look at the gameplay on the screen look at grid or metro or whatever I'm showing right now it's pretty high quality so why would you need 638 megabits per second well really you don't and that's the end of that let's look at the benchmarks first looking strictly at an Nvidia device we can see that with no capture software present grid is producing a 113 FPS on the 780 Ti and metro is producing a 76 FPS on the 780 Ti using shadow play we lose a couple frames on each of these one metro two and grid but it's with almost within margin of error it's one to two percent of frame loss meaning that there's really not much reason not to record your gameplay because it's performing effectively the same as when you're not recording but reason not to record it is if you suck which is still arguable because it produces funny content as I have done or if you don't have the storage requirement for more video which I'll talk about in a moment raptor is GVR is compatible with both Nvidia and AMD devices it will perform better on AMD because the AMD is supporting Raptor in the creation of the software but I tested it on both just for sake of discussion you can see on the Nvidia card here we are not looking at AMD yet we dropped from 113 fps and grid to 82 fps when recording gameplay with GVR that is substan but still not quite noticeable for most users in Metro we drop from 76 fps to 68 again not very noticeable in fact less than 10 frames per second and it's high enough 60 is our baseline for playability so high enough that is still playable for apps we drop all the way to 61 fps and grid which is almost a 50% drop in performance that is substantial at this point you are modifying your game settings in order to accommodate your video recording habits so that becomes an issue moving to AMD I could not test shadow play on this because it is incompatible but we look at no capture and we're at around 103 fps for grid 81 for Metro with DVR enabled we're keeping 94 FPS is very simple math because look at the numbers that is about a 90 percent retention rate of your frames meaning you're retaining almost all of your frames that are produced while recording with DVR just as Nvidia does with shadow play pretty impressive especially for a new solution by rafter and this remains true with Metro looking at fraps once again we have a 40-ish percent drop in total performance that is pretty that's a pretty big drop and it's going to be it's kind of beat painful so you need to drop your settings to accommodate this and finally before moving to the storage we're looking at performance degradation from baseline at this point between AMD and NVIDIA on the different solutions what you see at none is a 100% performance meaning all your frame is delivered this is our baseline I had to normalize and do Delta's because you can't linearly compare video cards like this without doing that so no matter what you're going to lose performance when you start recording no matter what solution you're using so we go from a hundred percent performance we drop down to 98 point to one percent of all frames delivered when using shadow play with an Nvidia card that's crazy 98.21 percent is almost a perfect system it's almost perfectly efficient which means that you really have no reason not to record and you might as well just capture it and delete it if it sucks Andie's gbr is still very good especially considering it is basically brand new it's something that Raptor and AMD have worked on together recently it retains ninety point eight six of its performance and same as Nvidia that's high enough that you're seeing almost no noticeable frame dips depending on the game you're playing with an Nvidia solution on gbr it's actually a very big hit it's it's more than 30 percent FPS lost when using gpiod record that is still far better than fraps but you really might as well use shadowplay unless GVR offers something that shadowplay does not that you need I can't think of it though fraps is all the way down to 47% on AMD and 40 percent of total performance on Nvidia pretty big hit at this point fraps has become somewhat invalidated other than specific use case scenarios on CPU driven systems on incompatible GPUs benchmarking things like that storage requirements fraps requires 95 70 megabytes that's 9.5 gigabytes of storage for a 2 minute video which is actually split into 3 files that's because record 638 megabits per second shadowplay and GVR require just under over 700 megabytes for the same 2 minute video which is very easy to move around you don't even need to edit it you can upload that straight to youtube if you wanted to kind of big but not bad that's at 50 megabits per second you can manually decrease this to about 20 if you are more reasonable human so the conclusion here GPR is very impressive shadowplay is extremely impressive and fraps is sort of going away unless they can update to take advantage of hardware acceleration fraps is still useful in certain use case scenarios that i described in the article shadowplay and gb are certainly have their limitations but they're growing rapidly they're backed by the two biggest and really only video card vendors or GPU vendors I should say in the DIY PC and gaming market so look at both of these if you're picking a GPU based on this capability you should you should probably read some of our other articles because it is a bit more complex than just this software stuff and that's all for this video I will see you all next time peace