Nvidia ShadowPlay. It's great, but...

[ithehappy]

Well since I bought the 970 I am enjoying this card, and I finally can utilise this option called Shadowplay to record some gameplay videos. But I don't know how intensive it is. I was playing COD AW yesterday and I made the settings all at Automatic and I was getting around 80-120 frames, then when I tried to record the game, Shadowplay at High setting, the game would lag every now and then, sometimes the frames would drop to even 20 or something like that! Mostly its smooth, but whenever there is a bomb blasting, or a rocket fired, the frames would drop significantly and basically the game is unplayable for 2 or 3 seconds. May I know why is that? Is it my CPU? The recordings were at 1700x1080 or something like that res. Should I decrease the recording resolution to 720p? I just want to record 60 frames constant, is that possible with retaining some decent amount of quality?

What I liked about the software is the small amount of file size, a 15 minutes recording was just 3 gigs or something, while with Dxtory it was at least 4 or 4 times larger (with Lagarith).

Thanks in advance.

PS: I play at 1200p by the way.

 

[Aikouka]

Are you recording to the same drive that the game is on?

I've used Shadowplay a bit, and it has worked fairly well for me. The biggest difference between it and other setups that you describe is that Shadowplay uses h.264, and it actually pulls the data straight from the frame buffer on the GPU, tosses it into the h.264 encoder on the GPU and provides that data back to the host PC. That's an important distinction, because it theoretically shouldn't affect your game as it mostly touches areas that aren't in use while gaming (NVENC).

 

[ithehappy]

Yes, both on the same drive. I did that because all the other partitions are more or less filled up.

Anyway, the file sizes are small anyway, I'll try to change the recording folder to C partition and see what happens.

I have other partitions too but that is a Seagate 3 GB/s drive, the game and SP both are installed in my other WD Black drive, and that only has 2 partitions, that's the problem.

Anyway, thanks for your input mate.

 

[cyphilis]

I've never noticed a drop in frame rate.
So from how I read it,. you are waiting to a certain point then hitting the record button and noticing the lag? Try switching to where when you hit the button it records the last (however many you enter) minutes prior. See if that makes a difference.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

If you're streaming the video into a file that exists on the same drive the game is being loaded from then you'll likely get stuttering as the drive is strained for resources and the game tries to stream game data from it into memory.

 

[xantub]

I haven't found any noticeable effect when I'm recording games. But I don't play action games and I'm recording at 30FPS so that's probably why.

 

[Anubis]

I record at 60 FPS on max custom settings with a 970 playing at 3440*1440. I get no noticeable drop in frames,

I do not write to the same drive I play from + both drives are SSDs so there is no bottleneck there


my only issue with shadowplay is how it handles recording audio + voice - because it flat out does not work correctly for me at all

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Speed depends entirely on settings, the data rate the capture is written at to the drive depends on how many pixels you're capturing at what frame rate and what colour depth as well as the type of compression (if any) that is done before storing the file.

Whether or not that data rate exceeds your storage device depends on the read/write speed of that device, a slower HDD will become saturated faster, they also have high seek times since they work on spindle/head technology so if you're skipping between writing the stream to disk and also loading game resources of the same disk, that's likely cause problems, SSDs have no real seek times to speak of and usually have much faster data rates.

 

[ithehappy]

I've never noticed a drop in frame rate.
So from how I read it,. you are waiting to a certain point then hitting the record button and noticing the lag? Try switching to where when you hit the button it records the last (however many you enter) minutes prior. See if that makes a difference.

No, I am not waiting for a certain point to record the game, I record from the very beginning of a mission. The stuttering is happening randomly.

Can I record on an external hard drive?

 

[DigDog]

changing partition won't do anything for you, you are still on the same drive using the same arm to read from the same disk. you need a second disk, and if you dont have an SSD i suggest you drop everything and run out to buy one NOW.

 

[ithehappy]

Nah, had an SSD, it was mistakenly sold (with a laptop!), not getting one now. I mean I loved it no doubt, but right now I don't want to buy anything which has no relation to increase frame rates.

Anyway, found the culprit, it was a setting under COD AW, known as Cache Spot Shadow Maps or something like that, disabled it, and now the recordings are smooth.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Nah, had an SSD, it was mistakenly sold (with a laptop!), not getting one now. I mean I loved it no doubt, but right now I don't want to buy anything which has no relation to increase frame rates.

That sounds like my nightmare. D:

Anyway, found the culprit, it was a setting under COD AW, known as Cache Shadow Maps or something like that, disabled it, and now the recordings are smooth.

Happy you fixed the issue though.

 

[ithehappy]

This is a new thing I am noticing! The recordings are split! One 12 minute file of 11:59 duration and another (3.8 GB) and another file of 7:16 (2.3 GB)!

Something has to go wrong!

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Certain recording apps split the files when dumping to disk and maintain sizes no greater than 4Gb as this is a limitation in single file size limit on certain file systems like FAT32. I don't know if there's a setting for enabling/disabling this behaviour with Shadowplay, I know recording apps like Fraps do specifically have this option.

Either way you need to run the raw capture through some software to encode the file to make it a more manageable size so you can recombine the parts quite easily when you do that, even with basic free editing software like windows movie maker.

 

[ithehappy]

Certain recording apps split the files when dumping to disk and maintain sizes no greater than 4Gb as this is a limitation in single file size limit on certain file systems like FAT32. I don't know if there's a setting for enabling/disabling this behaviour with Shadowplay, I know recording apps like Fraps do specifically have this option.

Either way you need to run the raw capture through some software to encode the file to make it a more manageable size so you can recombine the parts quite easily when you do that, even with basic free editing software like windows movie maker.

I use Handbrake, thanks.

I need to figure out how to make the split files go away. Fraps or Dxtory never had this problem.

 

[ithehappy]

Okay, I don't know why but I can't open these videos with VirtualDub! It says unknown or unsupported file type!

Ah, never mind, had to install VirtualDub Mpeg plugin.