NVIDIA ShadowPlay, planned for Summer 2013, constantly works in the background utilizing the H.264 encoder built into every Kepler GPU from NVIDIA to auto-record your last 20 minutes of gameplay. “But wait,” I hear you saying. “FRAPS has recorded my game footage for years.” While that’s true, the recording process comes with a noticeable hit to performance, something NVIDIA tells me isn’t a concern with ShadowPlay.
Moreover, FRAPS creates impossibly large video files. Set to comparative quality settings (30fps at 1080p), a 1 minute and 9 second clip of Borderlands 2 results in a 3.6GB file with FRAPS. Using ShadowPlay to record the same length of gameplay yields a file size of 238MB.
To break it down even further, ShadowPlay’s high quality setting — a 30Mbps video bitrate and 48Hz 16-bit audio — produces a 675MB video without audio, and 708MB with audio. It’s a manageable file size, already encoded and ready for sharing. Like GeForce Experience itself, NVIDIA is trying to remove the technology and just let PC gamers play.
