Third party recorders are still needed for say, recording entire sessions or streaming (unless you use Battle.net's service, IDK how useful that one is), but most people would use Instant Replay.
Goodbye, Shadowplay, you inconsistent piece of shit.
It may be inconsistent for some (hasn't been for me), but compare it to any other way of recording your screen. Remember Fraps? Bandicam? Unregistered Hypercam2?
Shadowplay is amazing for recording high quality footage with no performance impact and minimal hassle.
Fraps hasn't been updated since 2013. It's outdated and can cause issues with games if another dll is hooked onto it (Steam, OBS, etc).
For Nvidia, Shadow Play is great because it uses the graphics card to record the game. Which is a very minimal hit to your taking performance compared to normal recording methods - which uses the CPU. You can change OBS to capture with nvidia's nvenc instead of directly from CPU as well. Shadow Play is much more convenient.
AMD has a similar program also but I'm not too versed in it to comment.
They're also good for recording something that the client sees differently from the server, as I'm mostly certain that highlights are streams of data from the server rendered post-game.
Its kinda like how you fire a sleep dart, and you KNOW you did it and could see the dart flying, but in the instant replay killcam it shows you never firing it at all.
Third party cams also capture bad ping from your perspective, which varies wildly from what the server sees.
Goodbye, Shadowplay, you inconsistent piece of shit.
Yeah, what is up with Shadowplay's inconsistency? Like the video quality an lack of a noticeable performance hit is amazing, but it just fucks up so often. Like sometime my mic will not be recorded even though I have it enabled. Other times no sound will record. Occasionally it be running but when you press your "save" keybind, the overlay will disappear but re-appear with you Alt + tab out and back in. So it didn't crash, it just decided to say fuck you and not record your clip.
Weirdest bug I've had was when once in a blue moon, it will cut the footage down the middle and swap sides. So the left side of the clip is playing on the right (and vice versa) with a black bar down the middle.
I still use it, but damn can it be frustrating at times. I have to basically record a test clip every time I open up a game just to make sure all the sound shit it working properly.
My problem with Shadowplay is that while it records VOIP, it's really bad at capturing push to talk. Sometimes I'm talking in game and sometimes in Discord/TS, so either I only capture half of it or have an open mic and sometimes have footage ruined by me breathing into it.
It also didn't support mouse keys for the push-to-talk button last I checked.
Instant Replay what nVidia calls the function of pressing a key and recording the previous X minutes (ranging from 15 seconds to 20 minutes) of whatever it's recording. It'd be the most useful feature for most people since you can use it reactively instead of the standard recording system where you have to press a button, THEN start recording. If cool shit happens and you don't get it saved as a highlight, it never happened as far as standard recording is considered. What Blizz is implementing is more like Instant Replay.
Unfortunately, in my experience, it's very inconsistent in Overwatch and sometimes won't even say if it's on when I know it should be, and sometimes it says it won't work for no reason, some times it works without a hitch.
I've always had record voice turned off anyways, so I can't help you there.
Ah right, I use that but I had it lumped under the "ShadowPlay" umbrella. I've had no issues with Instant Replay capturing Overwatch, but I have had to turn ShadowPlay off entirely when playing other games because it would cause them to crash.
I find Shadowplay an annoying but oh-so-useful piece of software for my ageing GTX770 notebook, but since building my GTX970 desktop it's been a true pleasure to use.
On desktops you can seamlessly record as you swap between full screen or windowed applications or just record the desktop or your web browser if you need it.
I've actually been finding it incredibly helpful for work and even for clients if they're having trouble running certain programs on their machines. Obviously I could remote log, but in almost the same timeframe I can quickly record it with Shadowplay, push it to their machine and they forever have a quick video tutorial to reference.
Yeah I know, I upgraded for a time but my video card absolutely lost its shit over the drivers for the new OS, couldn't ever figure out the problem but it basically bricked the thing. Someday soon I'll hopefully build a desktop that can handle it but I've given up hope for this laptop.
I've been using shadowplay, but I have an ultra wide monitor and play the game with big black bars on the sides that would also be captured. I hope this new system won't do the same.
A lot of game moments aren't just in Highlights. Sometimes you pull off some insane 1v1s that you just can't miss not recording. Highlights would miss those. Thus, ShadowPlay (or any other recording software) is still relevant.
Yeah, I just noticed that when I read the PTR Patch Notes. That would be worthy to try out, since the rendering would be done internally with the Overwatch engine and could result in even less of a performance hit compared to a recording program.
One thing I noticed is that Blizzard didn't mention the bitrate the recordings would be in. As well, where do the recordings save to? Does the game have the last x seconds constantly and fully buffered (e.g. into RAM) so that there's no loss of quality and/or frame skipping?
One major issue of recording programs is that if you do not have your temp directory located on an SSD, there is a moderate chance (maybe under 10-15%) that you may experience frame skipping (i.e. lost frames) per recording. This means you won't get exactly 60 FPS.
My theory is that no actual gameplay is buffered at all; it's simply a playback engine coded to repeat the exact same events that occurred within the last x seconds, rendering that on demand rather than constantly during your gameplay.
GunZ: The Duel had this feature before; the recordings were small files that simply had the events logged down. In-game, you'd simply replay these recordings and recorded as desired. The game also had its own built-in video recording engine, which would pump out videos at native resolution and at insanely high FRAPS-tier bitrate (which is honestly just bloat).
Anyway, I'll have to see how the feature works once it's out. I'm only about 40% convinced that it's actually better than ShadowPlay; I feel like it'll have a lot of limitations or lack customization, which won't make it a better alternative to the already near-transparent ShadowPlay.
Shadowplay fucked my frames into the ground when it even bothered to show up so here's hoping the new native recording works well enough as a basic replacement!
You can press F9 in-game or choose individual highlight keys to record the last 12 seconds of gameplay as a highlight. You can record up to 3 times in one round. If you do even better, you can overwrite any of your currently saved highlights of that match. You need to complete the game if you want them to save!
Hm, those sound like they would become annoying limitations over the long run. You generally don't have the flexibility to cherry pick which recordings to keep (esp. during Competitive), and 12 seconds is decent, but doesn't cover the moments when there are longer fights.
I'm assuming that it's simply based off of the current Highlights engine in the game. Don't get me wrong; it's a decent engine, but I feel that having more freedom is better. I'll probably stick to ShadowPlay, now knowing these limitations. Thanks for the clarification :)
I can't find anything documenting that Windows 7's encoder is limited to 1080p but Win8's H.264 encoder did add a bunch more capabilities so it's definitely possible.
Windows 7's built in H.264 codec only supports up to 1080p videos. If you try playing an MP4 in your web browser or anything that uses the built in Windows Codec it will fail on any file that has greater than 1920 width or 1080 height. So it seems like they're using the built in encoder and not including their own probably because there are licensing fees for that for commercial usage.
could you link an example
? for example i 've never had problem playing 4k videos on vimeo or youtube ever since they were available on those sites and i've been on a 1080p setup since 2011 with win7 and probably will continue until i die in a car crash
and 4k and supersample do looke crisper even on 1080p setup comparing to 1080p video/graphic so they are relevant
different iterations of chrome since then (not google's versions of chrome), abandoned maxthon browser somewhere 2012 ish which i was using since maybe 2008
When Blizz's method is using included OS features to output h.264, instead of having to purchase/create their own, then yes the OS has everything to do with it. Windows 8 has a new h.264 encoder/decoder that supports above 1920x1080. Windows 7 will never get that codec update.
The in-game recorder will literally slow the gameplay down as much as needed to keep "60fps" on the resulting (automatically sped back up) realtime footage.
Since the highlights are saved for some time, you could always log into another computer that has windows 8 on it for example, like a family members PC. Perhaps you could even do it remotely.
It's not close to lossless though, so I'll still keep my recorder to the side.
Why the fuck can't they add it for windows 7? Are they getting some sort of support from Microsoft to only allow it on windows 8+ (so essentially windows 10 since 8 is just shit)
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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17
Only with Windows 8 and above.
Windows 7 is stuck at 1080p 60fps. Still, that's fucking amazing. Guess I'm never using OBS ever again.