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Nvidia Shadowplay - Hardware Accelerated Recording


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#1 evilC

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Posted 12 August 2013 - 08:34 AM

If you own a GTX 650 or above, get ready to drool.
Record gameplay easily with minimal performance hit and directly to H.264 compressed files.
Record a match after you play it.

http://www.geforce.c...fficial-release



#2 Gremlich Johns

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Posted 19 October 2013 - 07:53 AM

Coming out 28 October

an extract"

"By default, ShadowPlay records a rolling buffer of the last 10 to 20 minutes of gameplay, but only generates a video file when you ask it to do so. The software also allows users to simply record an entire game session if they want. ShadowPlay produces standard MP4 files that users can do anything with, like uploading to YouTube, and a future update to GeForce Experience will add the capability for users to stream captured gameplay directly to Twitch."

Edited by Gremlich Johns, 19 October 2013 - 07:53 AM.


#3 ShinVector

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 07:42 AM

WOW Nvidia Shadowplay recording works very very well with MWO.
Uploading the video below.
Should up in an hour.
Interesting is that the video seems to be consistently at 60fps when it is not really that smooth live.

http://www.geforce.c...rivers-released


Edited by ShinVector, 28 October 2013 - 07:43 AM.


#4 evilC

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 08:33 AM

Not hugely impressed so far.

1080p only, no support for 16:10 resolutions - when playing in a 16:10 res such as 1920x1200, it re-sizes the image, giving an incorrect aspect ratio (Square boxes end up oblong).
60FPS only, 3.8GB per 10 minutes - not what I would call a decent level of compression.
Shadowplay is 10 mins only under win7, so you need to use manual recording mode to be guaranteed to get a whole match.


Not exactly what they were marketing.

Edited by evilC, 28 October 2013 - 01:32 PM.


#5 evilC

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 10:02 AM

View PostShinVector, on 28 October 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Interesting is that the video seems to be consistently at 60fps when it is not really that smooth live.

Typically recording software will enforce an FPS cap of the FPS you are recording at.
Seeing as this is a solution built in to the graphics card, I would not be surprised if it was doing something (ie dropping or duping frames) to ensure that a consistent 60 was met.

#6 evilC

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 01:37 PM

It seems that under win7, not only is the record-from-the-past feature limited to 10 mins, but manual recording is also limited to 10 mins.

This is apparently due to the MP4 container under win7 being limited to 4GB.

Niiice, thanks nVidia for delaying the launch to switch from M2TS (Because windows media player by default does not play H.264 M2TS files) to MP4 containers.

By catering to the lowest common denominator (People who did not know how to install VLC or another media player), nVidia have screwed the rest of us Windows 7 users with a brain who could happily work around the issue.

THANKS NVIDIA!

#7 ShinVector

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 04:53 PM

View PostevilC, on 28 October 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:

It seems that under win7, not only is the record-from-the-past feature limited to 10 mins, but manual recording is also limited to 10 mins.

This is apparently due to the MP4 container under win7 being limited to 4GB.

Niiice, thanks nVidia for delaying the launch to switch from M2TS (Because windows media player by default does not play H.264 M2TS files) to MP4 containers.

By catering to the lowest common denominator (People who did not know how to install VLC or another media player), nVidia have screwed the rest of us Windows 7 users with a brain who could happily work around the issue.

THANKS NVIDIA!



Uhhh... It is a first release... It is free... An it is probably very fixable once enough people request it.
They have achieved at least 70% of what they promised with little to no impact while recording.
And it does NOT crash MWO like FRAPS does during change of resolution.

Of course there are other feature like multi stream audio record they need to add.

Edited by ShinVector, 28 October 2013 - 06:16 PM.


#8 evilC

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 07:04 PM

Not exactly free. We paid for the H264 chip to be put in the cards...
Shadowplay was one of the reasons I bought the card, as it was in the marketing material - it was *meant* to be included with the card when I bought it 6 months ago.

#9 ShinVector

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 07:11 PM

View PostevilC, on 28 October 2013 - 07:04 PM, said:

Not exactly free. We paid for the H264 chip to be put in the cards...
Shadowplay was one of the reasons I bought the card, as it was in the marketing material - it was *meant* to be included with the card when I bought it 6 months ago.


Ok.. Ok.. we had different expectations.. I didn't know about until a few days back when my house mates was discussing it so, it was a pleasant surprise.

Hopefully that Win7 4GB issue sometime soon, like some had suggest 4GB split files is better than nothing.
Don't think I would upgrade to Win 8 any time soon.

#10 UnPh4ZeD

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Posted 28 October 2013 - 07:47 PM

IMO recording directly to H264 is a bad idea for HD content as it will have to be re-encoded at least 2 more times before it hits viewers eyes. RAW RAW RAW.

#11 focuspark

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM

View PostShinVector, on 28 October 2013 - 04:53 PM, said:



Uhhh... It is a first release... It is free... An it is probably very fixable once enough people request it.
They have achieved at least 70% of what they promised with little to no impact while recording.
And it does NOT crash MWO like FRAPS does during change of resolution.

Of course there are other feature like multi stream audio record they need to add.

It's not fixable without a perf/power hit because the chip on the card has limitations and hardware cannot be patched.

View PostevilC, on 28 October 2013 - 07:04 PM, said:

Not exactly free. We paid for the H264 chip to be put in the cards...
Shadowplay was one of the reasons I bought the card, as it was in the marketing material - it was *meant* to be included with the card when I bought it 6 months ago.

Hey, I'm really glad somebody else got this. Those H.264 chips have been in the cards for a couple of years now and people have been paying for the license without getting anything for it. Has annoyed me quite a bit.

View PostTwitchTv Unph4zed, on 28 October 2013 - 07:47 PM, said:

IMO recording directly to H264 is a bad idea for HD content as it will have to be re-encoded at least 2 more times before it hits viewers eyes. RAW RAW RAW.

H.264 is a necessary evil because compression is required. The data has to be stored somewhere and raw video streams are LARGE. H.264 help them to fit into memory while waiting for the disk to spool.

View PostevilC, on 28 October 2013 - 07:04 PM, said:

Not exactly free. We paid for the H264 chip to be put in the cards...
Shadowplay was one of the reasons I bought the card, as it was in the marketing material - it was *meant* to be included with the card when I bought it 6 months ago.

Yes and I know the person responsible for it being late. I give him a hard time about it regularly - I'll link him your post :-)

View PostevilC, on 28 October 2013 - 10:02 AM, said:

Typically recording software will enforce an FPS cap of the FPS you are recording at.
Seeing as this is a solution built in to the graphics card, I would not be surprised if it was doing something (ie dropping or duping frames) to ensure that a consistent 60 was met.

NVIDIA technology does NOT do this. Because NVIDIA has constant access to the GPU backbuffer, they can grab the frame when the encoder is ready without asking the system to hold the frame waiting for the encoder. Therefore the display frame rate is virtually the same with recording as it would be without.

I know, I was one of the devs who developed the prototype. :)

#12 UnPh4ZeD

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 12:51 PM

In fast paced games the best YouTubers do not record in H264. There are much better lossless codecs but it requires SSDs or Raid HDDs. Re-encoding multiple times in H264 absolutely butchers quality. I did a lot of testing in BF3. In busy scenes even recordings done at 30,000 bitrate looked horrible (after upload to YT) where as the recordings done with Lagarith were clear. As someone with two 780's I consider ShadowPlay a gimmic.

#13 evilC

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 01:25 PM

View Postfocuspark, on 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

Yes and I know the person responsible for it being late. I give him a hard time about it regularly - I'll link him your post :-)

What wound me up more was the delay due to switching from M2TS to MP4.
Not only was it catering to the lowest common denominator bs, it got delayed to make the product worse. M2TS (AFAIK) containers do not suffer from the 4GB filesize limit under win7, so why the hell did they pick MP4?
Give him a kick in the nuts from me for that one :)

View Postfocuspark, on 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

NVIDIA technology does NOT do this. Because NVIDIA has constant access to the GPU backbuffer, they can grab the frame when the encoder is ready without asking the system to hold the frame waiting for the encoder. Therefore the display frame rate is virtually the same with recording as it would be without.


I didn't mean dropping frames being passed to the encoder, I meant frames being dropped for the user's display. If recording @ 60FPS, you need images for each of those frames, so I could envisage a situation where frames were dropped/duped, to maintain a stable 60FPS.
Hell, I couldn't even image coding something to save 60FPS footage from something that varied FPS - how the hell do you even do that? And before some smart-*** tries to comment, if the source is at, for example, 65FPS, that means you cannot possibly get a 60FPS video from that source without frame blending or using frames from the wrong point in time, giving non-smooth or distorted motion.

But obviously as a shadowplay dev, you would know the answer there.

#14 evilC

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 01:34 PM

View PostTwitchTv Unph4zed, on 29 October 2013 - 12:51 PM, said:

In fast paced games the best YouTubers do not record in H264. There are much better lossless codecs but it requires SSDs or Raid HDDs. Re-encoding multiple times in H264 absolutely butchers quality. I did a lot of testing in BF3. In busy scenes even recordings done at 30,000 bitrate looked horrible (after upload to YT) where as the recordings done with Lagarith were clear. As someone with two 780's I consider ShadowPlay a gimmic.

Gonna call you out on this one.

There is nothing inherently wrong with H264.

It's the quality settings that matter - what method of H264 capture are you talking about? If it is a CPU-based system such as FRAPS, of course it is going to suck because it has to do it with as little CPU as possible, in real-time.

It is 100% possible to create a LOSSLESS video with H264, ergo your statement is false.

Edited by evilC, 29 October 2013 - 01:37 PM.


#15 evilC

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 01:40 PM

View Postfocuspark, on 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

Hey, I'm really glad somebody else got this. Those H.264 chips have been in the cards for a couple of years now and people have been paying for the license without getting anything for it. Has annoyed me quite a bit.

Oh and to comment on this - did GPU accelerated (CUDA) H264 encoding previously available for nVidia cards not use the chip?

#16 ShinVector

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 05:01 PM

View Postfocuspark, on 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

It's not fixable without a perf/power hit because the chip on the card has limitations and hardware cannot be patched.


No idea... What you are talking about.. Hmmmm..

#17 evilC

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Posted 30 October 2013 - 07:30 AM

FYI, I have updated my Auto-Ready app to automatically start nVidia ShadowPlay after readying up!

#18 focuspark

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Posted 30 October 2013 - 08:51 AM

View PostShinVector, on 29 October 2013 - 05:01 PM, said:


No idea... What you are talking about.. Hmmmm..

I mean, the GPU isn't flexible by downloading new software. The H.264 chip in the GPU is not a general purpose processor. It does one thing very well. You cannot download new software to make it do something else. Therefore it cannot be patched and will always be exactly what it is now.

View PostevilC, on 29 October 2013 - 01:40 PM, said:

Oh and to comment on this - did GPU accelerated (CUDA) H264 encoding previously available for nVidia cards not use the chip?

No. CUDA "accelerated" H.264 trancoding used the GPU 'streamprocessors' to do SIMD work. Think of these as limited scope CPUs. It was never very power efficient, nor very fast. In fact, the embedded transcode hardware in modern Intel CPUs is faster and more power efficient by a significant factor.

#19 Blue Footed Booby

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Posted 30 October 2013 - 11:31 AM

View Postfocuspark, on 29 October 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

It's not fixable without a perf/power hit because the chip on the card has limitations and hardware cannot be patched.
....


Uh, I don't think he meant "it's a first release" as in "it's a first release for the drivers," rather that these are the first cards to try to do this particular thing. Were you around when games first started using HDR lighting? The first generation or two of graphics cards to really support it couldn't handle HDR and anti aliasing at the same time. Some games (like Oblivion) wouldn't let you enable both. Others (like Far Cry 1's graphics update patch) would let you enable them, but would produce bizarre and wildly incorrect results.

Then most devs started using deferred rendering, which totally breaks traditional MSAA, which kinda obsoletes the fancy hardware wizardry in the Xbox 360's GPU that allows "free" 2x MSAA.

Point is, the first iteration of a new whiz-bang graphics card feature is almost never really worth paying extra money for. If you do, it's pretty silly to be disappointed when it turns out to be (for the moment) mostly a marketing gimmick.

Edited by Blue Footed Booby, 30 October 2013 - 11:34 AM.


#20 9erRed

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Posted 30 October 2013 - 11:52 AM

Greetings all,

Just to be clear this software/hardware is for all 600 series and above Nvidia cards.

- ShadowPlay leverages the H.264 encoder built in Kepler GPUs (GeForce GTX 600 series or higher) to record high quality, 1080p gameplay footage on the fly. -


But you best have an additional HDrive or large partition parked somewhere as has been stated, very large files created. And as expected, grabbing the last few min's of "just unbelievable moves" is just a hot key away now. (when capture length is set for that) This should make for some new and great Mech movie clips in the near future.
[although I think the 720P format would be fine for youtube posting.]

Looking forward to seeing what the twitter streams will be like now.

later,
9erRed





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