Gadgetory

hey guys i'm dimitri with Haru canucks and today we're going to take a look at nvidia shadowplay a software that allows you to record gameplay at 1080p and 60fps without affecting in frame rate the shadow play is available through the GeForce experience and only supported on desktop Kepler base GPUs so GTX 650 or higher that feature that h.264 encoder that allows that seamless video stream that is also the exact same reason how the shield is able to stream games at 60fps thanks to that built-in encoder unfortunately though notebook GPUs are not supported for shadow play now compared to other recording software shadow play is available for free through the GeForce experience and allows both local recording and twitch streaming auto twitch streaming is not yet an added but it's also limited to your nvidia GPU perhaps on the other hand is a very popular and a common recording software Alto it doesn't stream to twitch it is free but requires payment for the premium features and it will work regardless of your GPU opening up shadow play through the GeForce experience and we are presented with this very simple interface allowing you to turn it on and off open the folder with all your recordings and of course set your hotkeys for recording and we have three modes available usual manual mode for unlimited recording in Windows 8 or up to 3.9 gigabytes in Windows 7 and the shadow mode that is very useful to capture only some of your best moments of gameplay so you set your shadow time or the amount minutes and it will record that last set of minutes of your gameplay this is awesome for not having to record everything and later cut down on your best moments but allows you to play the game now and record up to 20 minutes of your last game play on Windows 8 and up to 10 minutes with windows 7 and I think this is a very unique aspect of shadow play that makes this a more superior capture tool and we can also adjust the quality of the recording from one point eight megabytes per second to six point two five megabytes a second which means that even at high quality you're not capping your right speed of like your conventional 7200 RPM drive so the two major disadvantages of other capture tools have been basically addressed by utilizing the built-in encoder have minimal effect on your frame rate and even a 1080p with high quality recording the right speeds are under control the audio option is very limiting at this time you can only record in game audio or none but cannot record yourself of course there are other methods of capturing the local audio but it would have been nice and convenient to do it all within shadowplay so finally let's jump into a game capture some awesome footage and see how it handles we get a recording indicator that helps to know whether you're recording or saving a footage now notice there are no options to change the resolution and I myself in gaming on a 16 x 10 monitor with effective resolution of 1920 x 1200 this means that my output image will be squished to 16 by 9 aspect and that's kind of a big limitation as my footage will look squished and unnatural now we're also recording at 60fps and have no control over that so if your in-game framerate drops below 60 we do get a bit of a choppy recording now finally I decided to test to see how much strange shadow play had on my performance and they used fraps to benchmark my frames to see if there was any difference and so I ran a one-minute benchmark three times both with shadow play on and off and looking at the result it is very impressive to see such a minimal performance strain with all three games my Delta was around two frames which really isn't significant and NVIDIA claims there is less than ten percent performance impact on your frame rate and throughout my testing my highest was a four and a half percent performance train in Metro which is still very impressive also one of the best things about shadow play are small file sizes compared to Bentley came or fraps these are one millionth files at 60 frames a second and as you can see you save yourself a significant amount of drive storage also let's take a look at detailed comparison between the three levels of quality that the shadow play offers so if you really are conservative on file sizes going with low quality will still deliver pretty decent results although it isn't as sharp and lose detail in motion so shadow play for Kepler based GPU users who want to record gameplay is an excellent option that allows up to 20 minutes of last gameplay to be recorded so you never lose your must be seen footage you also have an unlimited recording with windows 8 and 1080p at 60fps without putting too much strain on your hard drive with maximum 50 megabits per second rights and most importantly not affecting your in-game frame rate that is crucial for competitive matches and just a more seamless capture and plus twitch streaming is soon to be available now while the software is still in beta we cannot capture user audio we cannot change the resolution or the frame rate of your recording so these are just few limitations that will hopefully be addressed in the future but shadow play turns out to be a very well suited capture tool that is bound to get better and we're giving it the harbor Canucks named grant award so as always thanks for watching subscribe for more civil content and we'll see you in the next one