[Tutorial] Game Recording Softwares

[Bee]

Introduction:

---

• Hello,
  I have noticed many people asking for game recording software, so i had decided to make a guide regarding all the available good softwares. The below 3 softwares are the best so far by my knowledge for game recordings, they won't cause much FPS drop when recording:
  • ShoadowPlay - NVIDIA (High GPU Required)
  • FRAPS - Free Software (Can only download for 1 minutes but less FPS drop)
  • Bandicam - Free Software (Can download for 10 minutes and a little high fps drop when compared to FRAPS)

ShadowPlay:

---

• Basic Description:
  • ShadowPlay is an software created by NVIDIA exclusively for gaming. It keeps track of your gaming history for the past 20 minutes, so when you play it, the software will be starting from 20 mins back. Yes, it's very helpful in reports if you don't know when a person rule breaks. The major drawback is the GPU, most of the players won't be having it and the other few won't be using NVIDIA.
  
  
  Detailed Description:
  • Nvidia ShadowPlay is a hardware accelerated screen recording utility for Windows PCs using GeForce GPUs, made by Nvidia Corp as part of its Geforce Experience software. It is similar to programs like FRAPS but uses new dedicated frame capture API which eliminates the traditional 50+% FPS loss from framebuffer capturing. It also utilizes dedicated H.264 video encoding hardware found in 600 and 700 series graphics cards to allow the captured content to be compressed in real time to further improve performance.ShadowPlay can be configured to record continuously with a rolling buffer of customizable length, allowing the user to save the video retrospectively if something interesting has happened in their game, without having to remember to start recording beforehand.ShadowPlay currently only supports games that use DirectX 9 or higher.
    
    Under traditional methods of video capture, the act of capturing a frame prevents it from being sent to the monitor and forces a refresh, this halves the framerate before any additional overhead (which reduces performance even further). The captured frame then has to be encoded in some manner, typically a lightly compressed or uncompressed format to minimize further loss of performance. Then the resulting video is saved to a hard drive. With ShadowPlay's first release nvidia announced two new frame capturing methods, Frame Buffer Capture (NVFBC) and Inband Frame Readback (NVIFR). Both of which are integrated into the driver to allow frames to be captured with very low overhead (under 5%). NVFBC provides the best performance, but can only be used in full screen mode, it is the API used by ShadowPlay. NVIFR can be used in either fullscreen or window mode, but has somewhat higher performance impact (although still much lower than traditional methods), it is likely to be the capture method of choice for 3rd party utilities (unless they choose to implement both). Once ShadowPlay captures a frame, it encodes it using the dedicated hardware encoding embedded in the Nvidia GPU. This leaves the general hardware of the CPU and GPU available for other tasks and ensures the performance impact is almost nonexistent. As an additional benefit, the hardware encoding uses h264 which greatly reduces the size of the resulting video, this serves to both reduce the impact on the HDD speed as well as making ram buffering practical.
  Requirements:
  
  Download:
  
  Downloaded directly from NVIDIA Control Panel.

FRAPS:

---

• Basic Description:
  • Fraps (derived from frames per second) is a benchmarking, screen capture and screen recording utility for Windows. It can capture from software that uses DirectX and OpenGL, such as PC games.
    It is an free software but without premium membership, it can be used to record only for 1 minute and also the quality is alot lesser than ShadowPlay and BandiCam. Doesn't record 20minutes before like ShadowPlay.
  Detailed Description:
  • Fraps is proprietary and commercial software, but it is free to use for frame rate display and benchmarking, and free to use with limitations for video capture (30 second time limit, watermark) and screen capture (BMP format only). Because of the way it captures the screen contents, Fraps needs to run with administrative privileges.[citation needed]
    
    The frametimes benchmark feature (logging of individual frame render times) gained attention in 2013 on computer review sites in debate about micro stuttering in games.
    
    On Windows Vista and Windows 7, the desktop can be captured if Windows Aero is enabled. Windows 8 game capture works, but not desktop capture as of version 3.5.99.
    
    Fraps records video at high resolution if the computer is sufficiently powerful. The maximum supported resolution is currently 7680×4800.
    
    Fraps uses a proprietary codec. Therefore, playing Fraps video output requires Fraps or ffdshow to be installed. Compression is relatively low and the resulting file sizes are relatively large: A two-minutes-long screencast of a full HD screen (1920×1080) may take up 3.95 GiB on disk.There is an option to encode the RGB value of every pixel, but the default is to use a YUV scheme for better compression.The color space used is Rec. 709, full range.
  Requirements:
  
  Works for any system.
  
  Download:
  

BandiCam:

---

• Basic Description:
  • Bandicam is a screen capture utility that can take screenshots or record screen changes. Bandicam consists of two modes. One is the 'Rectangle on a screen' mode, which can be used for recording a certain area on the PC screen. The other is the 'DirectX/OpenGL window' mode, which can record the target created in DirectX or OpenGL.
    BandiCam is similar to FRAPS, it's an free game recording software but when you are recording something, there will be slightly higher FPS drop when compared to FRAPS, but the big advantage is that, you can record for 10 minutes whereas in FRAPS only for 1minute.
  Detailed Description:
  • Bandicam displays a FPS count in the corner of the screen while it is active in the 'DirectX/OpenGL window' mode. When the FPS count is shown in green, it means the program is ready to record, and when it starts recording, it changes the color of the FPS count to red. The FPS count is not displayed when the program is recording in the 'Rectangle on a screen' mode.
    
    Bandicam is a shareware, meaning that it can be tested free of charge for a limited period of time. During trial period, Bandicam places its name as a watermark at the top of every recorded video or screenshot, and each recorded video is limited to 10 minutes in length.
    
    Bandicam can record video at resolutions up to 2560×1600 in size. As Bandicam supports AVI 2.0 OpenDML extensions, the maximum clip size is unlimited as long as the local Hard Disk has free space available.
  Requirements:
  
  Works for any system.
  
  Download:
  
  How to download Bandicam:
  http://www.bandicam.com/support/intro/bandicam_install/
  How to use Bandicam:
  http://www.bandicam.com/support/how_to_record/

Notes:

---

• If you want to just skim through the passages, just read the highlighted text.
• Most of the content has been taken from Wikipedia.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask here and i'll get back to you as soon as possible

[BUTCHER]

Great job, looks good

[Bee]

Thank you, much appreciated.

[DR34M]

Great job, looks good

[The_King]

Can you help me with this pls
i really want to install and record but i dont know how to install n fix it.
I have teamviewer if needed,tenks. <3

[Bee]

How to download Bandicam:
http://www.bandicam.com/support/intro/bandicam_install/
How to use Bandicam:
http://www.bandicam.com/support/how_to_record/

[Gapozoo]

Great job

[Psykick]

Shadowplay is the best for new NVIDIA graphics card..


PS:Add the OBS,aswell.And if you need my help,PM me.

[Bee]

I don't think OBS is available for windows 7/8. Or is it?

[Psykick]

I don't think OBS is available for windows 7/8. Or is it?

It is.I have Windows 7 64bit Ultimate,and I'm already using it.

[Resick]

camtasia?

[Peksi]

W10 = Win + Alt + R, Works better than fraps for me.