Nvidia Screen Recorder: Features, Limits, and Best Alternative

How to use Nvidia screen recorder to capture your gameplay or desktop screen?

Nvidia has a screen recorder indeed to help its graphics card owner capture game video with no effort, and that’s exactly the Nvidia Share, previously known as ShadowPlay. As a bundled utility of Geforce Experience (Geforce RTX graphics card’s companion application), Nvidia Share offers 3 core features: Instant Replay, Record, and Broadcast Live, the former two of which are de facto the potential screen recorders.

Instant Replay vs. (Manual) Record, What’s the Difference?

The two both give you the ability to record gameplay, but the distinction is:

– Instant Replay is a functionality to automatically record gameplay in the background with no time limit. Whenever you have some epic or interesting moments to save like killstream, you should only need to press hotkey to save the last 5-minute (adjustable) game video locally. No press, the cache recording will be discarded and replaced by later capture data.

– Once you start the Record of Nvidia Share, it does real-time recording and hardware-accelerated encoding and saves the video to a local hard disk until you give it to an end. Many customers call this capture mode “manual recording”.

Nvidia Video Capture Supported PC, Games, Settings..

● System requirement of Geforce Experience Share: Windows 7/8/10 with Nvidia GTX 600 series card or higher (Check out more details)
● Geforce Experience and Share supported games: DirectX 9/10/11-based games. Note that OpenGL games are only supported at windowed mode. (Supported games)
● Video Codec/Format: Hardware Accelerated H.264 MP4
● Instant Replay length: 0.25 – 20 minutes
● Manual recording length:
For Windows 7, it’s limited to 4GB (about 20 minutes depending on quality settings).
For Windows 8 or later, there’s no time limit as long as the free disk space is enough.
● Capture quality: Low, Medium, and High. Customization is also available.
● Resolution: up to 3840×2160
● Frame rate: up to 60fps
● Bit rate: 10 – 50 Mbps

How to Use Nvidia Screen Recorder to Capture Screen Video

Step 1. Enable Nvidia Share

Surely, the premise of a normal Nvidia recorder usage is that its Share feature is enabled. Check and enable it under Settings -> General -> Share.

Step 2. Choose the Recording Mode

As mentioned above, Share has two capture modes – Instant Replay and manual Record. You decide which is more suitable for you according to your actual requirements.

Step 3 – Set for Recording

The settings may include that listed Nvidia Video Capture Settings in the previous part like video quality, length, resolution, fps, and bit rate, and some others like audio source/volume, recording saving path, HUD layout contents (camera, FPS counter etc.) and position.

Another thing you should know is that Nvidia Share supports both windowed and full desktop capture. To conduct an entire desk recording, you should open up the Privacy control panel under Settings and toggle the Desktop capture option to the green-background “On” status.

Step 4 – Start and End Recording

Everything is prepared well, run your PC game and go ahead with the capture in its way. Below are some hotkey concerning Nvidia recording:
Alt+Shift+F10: Turn on or off the Instant Replay
Alt + F10: Save the last x minutes recorded when Instant Replay is on.
Alt + F9: Toggle manual recording on or off. Save the manual recorded video.

After the recording, you can directly upload the clip onto social media platforms on the overlay.

Limits of Nvidia Screen Recorder and Best Alternative

☛ GeForce Experience is born with advantages on game recording thanks to the hardware’s accelerated processing and less performance penalty (about 5-10%). However, if your GeForce video card on a desktop or notebook is not competent for that, say GTX 500 series or lower, you will lose the chance to enjoy the GeForce Experience screen recorder.

☛ Then since GeForce Experience is a multi-functional program which is designed for updating graphics driver, optimizing gaming performance, as well as screen capturing and live broadcasting, it puts more effort into feature balance and basic game capture, missing some settings or functions that many common dedicated screen recorder will embed, for instance, non-game recording, recording formats, edit suites, and scheduled recording.

☛ At last, as we’ve shown above, Windows 7 users can simply document around 20-minute game fights and couldn’t benefit from the unlimited manual recording like Windows 8 and 10 hosts.

If you are up a creek in either of these circumstances, you will have to turn to some best Nvidia screen recorder alternatives like RecMaster. RecMaster is an easy yet feature-laden screen recording software program. With it, you can capture any DirectX game or non-game video with audio on a desktop at your preferred size, format, and quality. Multiple-monitor capture, automatic capture, webcam overlay, voice narration, in-game annotating, defined watermark, bundled video editor, and one-click sharing are all here to ensure a happy customized journey. Now let’s take a look at how it works on the computer. You are suggested to free download it here and set it up on your machine.

How to Screen Record Game or Non-game Video with RecMaster on PC/Mac

Step 1 – Prepare Content and Choose a Recording Mode
Depending on the recording content, you should select one recording mode once you launch RecMaster.

Game Mode is a Windows-only feature that’s especially developed for PC gamers. Something like Nvidia’s manual recording, helps you keep the whole gameplay walkthrough or some crucial segments as 1080p HD/4K@60FPS MP4.
Full Screen is to grab the whole display video.
Custom Area is used for any certain region recording, maybe an app, a browser tab, or something else.
The Webcam mode simply records and outputs camera video of integrated or external front cam.
Audio Only serves as an audio recorder for maintaining any online radio, music, podcast, and so on.

In most cases, Game Mode is the go-to option for game capture, and Full Screen & Custom Area for general non-game recording. Nevertheless, if your PC game doesn’t cooperate with Game Mode, switching to recording mode is a reliable workaround.

Step 2 – Do Settings
For video capture, you can adjust video format (MP4/AVI/FLV), and define a quality level and frame rate value. Also, you can mix webcam overlay, system sound, and voiceover from the mic. If you want to achieve more watermark and cursor effects, go to the Settings panel to do so,

For auto-capture, please open up Schedule task control, fix the start & end time, and then don’t forget to enable the task.

Step 3 – Record and Stop
Pressing the red buttons to start and stop the recording. During the process, the mini floating bar gives you access to annotation too. After the recording, the recording list offers entrances to the editor and social share.

RecMaster Hotkeys:
Start/Pause recording: Alt+1 | End recording: Alt+2 | Show main window: Alt+3 | Hide/Show webcam: Alt+4

Ending

Nvidia screen recorder is the Nvidia Share, formally known as ShadowPlay, a feature part of Geforce Experience. It’s an incredible utility that takes advantage of the powerful graphics card to accomplish video processing. If your computer has already installed it and you don’t have many other advanced needs, try it to feel the convenience. But if your PC isn’t equipped with Nvidia GTX 600 or above, or you are still running outdated Windows XP or 7, a third-party screen recorder like RecMaster is more recommended.

See Also:
AMD Radeon Screen Recorder | 2020 Overview, Guide, Limitation etc.