Shadowplay beta review

[Godlygamer23]

Hello forum members. Yesterday was the beta release for Shadowplay. NVIDIA introduced as a recording method that would hardly cause performance loss, or have no performance loss at all. I decided to test that. I do not have any frame rate numbers or capture card differences, but what I do have are videos and file size numbers as well as recorded frame rate and resolution. I'll also throw in some screenshots. Lets begin.

 

I went to Geforce.com to obtain the latest driver revision to get Shadowplay. Driver update went smooth(as usual). However, I did run into one hiccup. In order for Shadowplay to work, you have to enable it. Shortly after enabling it, I got a BSOD. That occurred once and after my system recovered, it never happened again. It's beta - issues may become apparent. Lets move onto screenshots. I'll be posting two. One is the Shadowplay preferences area, and the other is the Shadowplay window itself.

 

 

As you can see in the preferences section, you can disable the recording indicator, change the recording indicator's location by corners, change the exporting location, and change your key assignments to activate Shadow recording or manual recording. I decided to use my macro keys for that.

 

In the Shadowplay window, you can see the software switch to disable or enable Shadowplay. You can also see the difference modes you can record in(Shadow or manual). I disabled Shadow recording, but left manual enabled(which is why Shadow time to greyed out). You can also change your recording quality and remove in game sound.

 

Now, how was actual recording? Did I notice any problems? For the most part, no. Upon enabling recording, it wasn't apparent that I was recording. At one point, there was stuttering, but that has seem to have gone away. For those of you wondering, yes I was recording to the same drive my game was running on. As you can see in the Shadowplay screenshot, I was recording at 1080p 60FPS. File size for 4 minutes and 24 seconds was 1.65GB. And yes, I do have a video showcasing it, which will be posted at the bottom. So what are my specs? I have a 3570K @ 4.2GHz with 12GB of RAM at (effectively) 1.3GHz. I also have two 660 TI's running in SLI at stock.(DirectCU II cards)

 

Here's my video test. It was uploaded as is and has not been tampered with, except for the 30FPS thing by Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0eVD8HY19Y

 

 

 

[legopc]

good topic but unfortunetly i cant use it since i have a 560ti

[RankUpGamers]

I wonder if using SLI could have been the BSOD or the stutter... On my laptop, video looks okay... Excited to try this, but I would like to see a dedicated card from nvidia that would have more ways of compression, or record uncompressed to a SSD. Awesome though!

[Godlygamer23]

I wonder if using SLI could have been the BSOD or the stutter

Actually, when I first enabled Shadowplay, SLI was disabled. The stuttering was also in single GPU mode.

[RankUpGamers]

Actually, when I first enabled Shadowplay, SLI was disabled. The stuttering was also in single GPU mode.

Odd... Haven't tried it yet. Will see if my 660 stutters.  Have you tried using it to auto record, then save that recording? Like, the way it records up to 20 minutes, but doesn't save until you hit the key.

[sperkowsky]

looks nice

[James_AJ]

It actually looks very nice. No cropping, no visible artifacts (or whatever they are called) and despite being H.264 and being encoded again by YouTube's sh*tty engine, it looks surprisingly good enough for the internet! I imagine the original looked a lot better though.