Nvidia's Scott Herkelman said on Friday that with the upcoming release of GeForce Experience 1.7, the company will also introduce ShadowPlay, a capture tool that lets GeForce-based players capture and stream their gameplay with little performance hit to frame rates.
"We built ShadowPlay to solve a common problem. Gamers love to record their games and share those magic moments, good or bad, with friends and fellow gamers," he writes. "But doing so has meant a forced compromise: tools are expensive or slow, or both. And it's hard to rack up kills when you're running software that kills your frame rate."
To enable ShadowPlay, users simply click on the button in the top right-hand corner of the GeForce Experience window. A pop-up box appears: simply flip on the switch and you're good to go. When ShadowPlay is running, users will see a circular icon at the bottom left corner of the screen. Hitting ALT + F10 will start the "Shadow Mode" filming, and ShadowPlay will capture up to the last 20 minutes of gameplay. "Manual Mode," which is initiated by hitting ALT + F9, allows users to start and stop recordings of any length.
"The beauty of ShadowPlay is that, because it takes advantage of the hardware built into every GTX GPU, you don't have to worry about any major impact on frame rates compared to other, existing applications," Herkelman writes.
The gameplay footage is saved to a temporary file in an H.264 format, and can be edited using Microsoft's free Windows Movie Maker application, or any other .mp4-compatible editor. Right now, users can upload their video to YouTube manually, but Nvidia is currently working to integrate Twitch with ShadowPlay so that players can actually stream their game footage to friends and "fans" worldwide.
"GeForce ShadowPlay is a high-performance, fast and free gameplay-capturing tool that's available exclusively to GeForce customers," he writes. "It's also super easy to use, having the H.264 encoder built directly into GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series GPUs."
GeForce Experience 1.7 with ShadowPlay will be made available on Monday, October 21.
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