How to enable ShadowPlay recording on the newest NVIDIA drivers.

[villiansv]

Just updated to the latest nvidia 331.65 drivers and noticed that it has this nifty fraps-like ShadowPlay thingy. Unfortunately, it is only enabled for desktop cards, and naturally it wouldn't work on my laptop. More info - http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-experience-1-7-launches-with-geforce-shadowplay

However, there's an easy way to enable it. You do need to have geforce experience installed, though (not sure it works without). Find the Gefore Experience executable first, for me it's in

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe"

So, how to enable it. Right-click on the exe file and choose "create shortcut". Being in the Program Files folder, it will likely complain it can't create files there and ask if the desktop is ok - say yes. If not, the shortcut will be created in the same folder and you can move it to the desktop, or any location of your choice.

Then, right-click the shortcut, choose Properties, and in the Target field you have

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe"

Change this to

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe" -shadowplay

then Apply/OK.

Run the shortcut, you will get geforce experience starting up with an extra control window for ShadowPlay. Flip the switch on the left to enable it - for me this caused the screen to flicker a few times (probably installing some extra video filter driver, who knows). Then you will be able to play with the (meager) settings.


Why is this better than Fraps/etc.? It uses the graphics card built-in hardware encoder to create 1080p/60fps video without stressing the cpu. This results (apparently, not tested) in only 10-15% performance drop and since it is done on the fly, it doesn't generate large files (and hence removes the need for superfast SSDs and loads of space to record to).

I'll let people more experienced in frapsing to test this further and discover any further advantages or disadvantages. I tested it on Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Enslaved - Oddysey to the West, and played back the recordings in MPC-HC with no noticeable visual issues, or stuttering.

Enjoy 🙂

[BlapX]

Hahah OMG, you are Boss 😄 It works like a charm ey 😄

Let me post up some pics asap!

[BlapX]

Hahah OMG, you are Boss 😄 It works like a charm ey 😄

Let me post up some pics asap!

EDIT: Here a quick one of me playing BF4..... my guess is that, with fraps the quality is better? Vids are way bigger on FRAPS in size then with Shadowplay i notice so far

[Ivan02052]

how do you switch off the front webcam?

[villiansv]

For me the videos are in 1920x1080x60fps, I haven't really played with fraps.

The main advantage of this is that it doesn't record raw uncompressed video (which normally requires a lot of space and a very fast drive), but compresses to h264 >>on the fly<< before writing to disk. This means the resulting files aren't obscenely large, you do not have to compress later on, and any reasonable HDD can be used to record to. Of course, as usual recording to a device different than the one you are running the game from is probably still preferable, unless you have an SSD.

[BlapX]

villiansv wrote:
For me the videos are in 1920x1080x60fps, I haven't really played with fraps.

The main advantage of this is that it doesn't record raw uncompressed video (which normally requires a lot of space and a very fast drive), but compresses to h264 >>on the fly<< before writing to disk. This means the resulting files aren't obscenely large, you do not have to compress later on, and any reasonable HDD can be used to record to. Of course, as usual recording to a device different than the one you are recording to is probably still preferable, unless you have an SSD.

I know what u mean tho, with fraps a 1 min. clip is around 1,64Gig and with shadowplay 5 mins are 1,9Gig if im correct. So yea thats a huge difference.. But with SSD here i barely notice FPS drops in Fraps... But yea from now on im gonna start using Shadowplay as i always have to compress after Fraps 😛

Gonna keep fraps for FPS display in my games tho 🙂

Once again thanks man, working fine here. I gave u some reputation points for this tread 😉

Best regards, Blap

[Prophet968]

BlapX, The quality is the same depending on the setting you use in Shadowplay. On high shadowplays quality is essentially the max possible... That being said, even on a one to one quality comparison Shadowplay will probably be slightly smaller due to optimizations made while recording.

Shadowplays main reason for, well, existing, is that it has the least performance loss possible. This is due to dedicated features in Nvidias keplar technology (The G750's all have this) even the GTX765M can run it, and well at this.

[x70xchallengerx]

That's it!?!?

Wow Nvidia... xD Well awesome I'm gonna give this a try.

villiansv wrote:


Then, right-click the shortcut, choose Properties, and in the Target field you have

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe"

Change this to

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GeForce Experience\GFExperience.exe" -shadowplay

[Maxter]

Sir, I take my hat off for you. This is awesome!

[slothability]

This is for anyone who has issues getting the workaround method for enabling shadowplay to work.
For the video tutorial and demo at the end I used an Asus G75 laptop with a GTX 660M GPU
Cheers, and thanks for the instructions found here.
Nvidia Shadowplay needs some updates but it's very very promising.