How to Record CS: GO Gameplay on Windows (10) or macOS

Gaming consoles like PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 do have internal capture tool to record CS: Go highlights and sessions, then how about capturing this gameplay on computer like Windows 10 and macOS 10.15?

Video games are obsessed with the shooting type, because being a first-person gun shooter can make people’s brain to be much happier. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, commonly known as CS: GO, is just one of the most skill-based competitive FPS games. Although the first main series of CS is released in 1999 and even the latest CS: GO went into public 8 years ago, this a little bit old almost-decade PC game doesn’t get color faded or dying. On the contrast, according to the data this year, compared to that in its release year, its concurrent player count passed 1 million. Losing popularity? Not exactly.

With so many gamers involved in this Riot’s FPS game, some must want to record CS: GO moments as demo video, training course, or simply for skill communication as terrorists and counter terrorists. That’s where this guide comes in, in which three easy methods are given to help.

Method 1: Capture CS:GO Gaming Video with RecMaster

RecMaster, as one of the best game recorders for Windows and Mac, gives an easy capture solution for gaming users. Designed with a Game Mode, RecMaster allows Windows users, from XP to 10, to enjoy a high performance recording on (DirectX) games including CS: GO. Besides, two another recording modes – Full Screen and Custom Area – are also delivered as alternatives to obtain a desired screencast. Note that RecMaster’s Mac version doesn’t equipped with Game Mode, however, since Full Screen shares the similar functionality to Game Mode, don’t worry about its capability.

Now please free download RecMaster for your Windows or Mac computer, be it desktop or laptop. And then follow the steps below after the installation.

Step 1: To guarantee a smooth capture, you are suggested to launch RecMaster first to enter into the main windows. Windows customer will see five recording modes while Mac users four same modes except Game Mode.

Step 2: If you want to record game from its startup, you should click “Game Mode” or “Full Screen” and do settings now on video format, video quality, video frame rate (up to 60), webcam, system sound and microphone. You should turn on webcam and microphone when you are planning to create picture-in-picture game movie with narration.

You need to click to go to Settings panel if you’d like to add certain watermark and change the video saving folder/capture hotkeys according to your habit. Also, if you have annotating requirement, do ensure the “Hide panel when recording” option under General -> Floating toolbar is not ticked.

Then back to the main window again, you can hit REC button or press hotkey to start the capture right away or initiate the CS GO recording after step 3.

Step 3: Then run the Counter Strike game and choose your role, maps, and so on. You’d better check and optimize the gaming settings, especially the advanced video options, to bring about a fluent recording with no or less lags. When everything is OK, load and play the game. If you didn’t make the recording happen in Step2, time to start it up now.

Step 4: For your first time recording, RecMaster will by default give you a small hotkey prompt window and 3-second countdown. When CS: GO shooting and recording go on, it’s your show time.

Step 5: At anytime during the video grabbing, you can hide or show webcam the webcam inset, and evoke the floating bar to pause and resume, open annotation bar to draw line/shapes, write text etc.

Step 6: When you game is over, give the recording to an end and save the file immediately with stop button or hotkey.

Step 7: On the Recording list windows, you are free to preview, rename, edit and share the clip to YouTube.

Method 2 – Record CS: GO Demo with Console Command

This is a traditional way that many CS: GO players may not know. To help people make quick in-game movie, CS has its own capture tool to document demo. GOTV and POV are two types of CS demo. And in most cases, we only want to shoot our own gaming behaviors as POV demo.

The operation is quite easy: with ”Enable Developer Console (~)” option under game settings is toggled as Yes, whenever you want to do the recording avid a game, press “~” on the keyboard to pop up a Console panel, and then type “record + clipname” to begin the recording. To finish the recording, type “Stop” in the console or quit the game directly.

You can press “Shift + F2” to playback such demo video at different playback speed, and jump over to whatever Round or Death as you like.

The drawback of this demo recording is that, it’s only playable inside CS. To export it for further usage, you will have to ask help from two another tools called MovieCFG and HLAE. For more details, please check the demo exporting guide from STREAMCOMMUNITY.

Method 3 – Using System/Hardware DVR Service to Record CS: GO

System first. If your machine runs Windows, then you can gain the benefit of system bundle feature – Game Bar. As long as it’s enabled here, you can type “Win logo + G” to showcase its overlay or one-click start the background capture with “Win logo + G + R” shortcuts. Like Xbox gaming console’s Game DVR, it’s also available to record the last like 30 seconds segments by using “Windows logo + Alt + G”. From the Game Bar overlay panel or system gaming settings, you are endowed to adjust video quality, fps, maximum recording duration (up to 4 hours) and audio as you prefer.

Then hardware. As long as your computer has a quality GPU from Nvidia or AMD, you can enjoy their free hardware capture capability from service like Geforce Experience and Radeon ReLive. Although their capture flexibility may not catch up with screen recorder expert, their hardware accelerated data processing do really have minimal impact on gaming performance.

Ending

This post mainly illustrates 3 ways to record CS: GO video, each of which holds its own pros and cons. The sincere tips are:
– If you record it only to analyze, study for improvements, method 2 [console command] is the most convenient one to choose. Free services from system or hardware are also good bets.
– If your purpose of game capture is to share or teach, method 1 [standalone game recorder] is more appropriate.
– If you are encounter any recording error with CS: GO, check the troubleshooting ideas below.

☛Why my CS: GO recording is laggy wth fps drop? How to fix it?
☛Why and how to solve my CS: GO recording has no sound?
☛How to fix CS: GO recording is black screen [with OBS or Other]?