Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsShadowPlay is BestPlay
Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2015
This is not only an excellent card for gaming AND moderate video editing (more on that later), it's ShadowPlay technology is practically the holy grail of gameplay capture. I'm quite serious when I say I've scoured the internet for all different kinds of capture methods, both software AND hardware, and for PC capture, this is by far the slickest.
As a matter of fact, it's 1080p60 capture is just about the best method to capture video I've encountered. I run a YouTube channel (RhubarbSenpai, if you're deathly curious for some reason), and merely the purchase of this card has opened up a TON of possibilities. I can honestly say it's spoiled me, all other capture methods are clunky and obtuse in comparison to how ingeniously the card handles it all on the same PCB.
For console gameplay, even with the highest end capture methods available, it's now FAR preferable to try emulating the game on my PC, JUST for the capture. It's seriously that good.
You know those old NES/SNES games that would have the flashing sprites whenever you took damage? Those sprites are alternating every frame, so you HAVE to record at 60fps unless you want the damage animation to just make your character's sprite disappear from the screen for a while.
[You can see this if you watch any of the Game Grumps console playthroughs, most prominently Zelda II]
Is that important to how most people are gonna use this? Hell no! But I haven't heard anybody else mention it, like.... ever, so, there you go.
You might think, hey, AMD has the same thing with the on-card video compression and capture, right? Well, theirs take a noticeably larger chunk out of performance. (To be fair, anything's noticeable compared to ShadowPlay's unbelievably efficient ~1.3% drop in performance) The card I had before this was an HD 7970 GHz Edition, so, in defence of Team Red, this is most assuredly not an accurate comparison against AMD's current hardware. But, to my knowledge, they suffer the same architecture problems and lack of desktop capture. It also was completely unable to capture any footage from any game that wasn't on it's 'supported' list. (And even then, it had a lot of problems, black useless capture files that you wouldn't find out about until recording ended... stuff like that. I chalked it up to a dying fan, but turns out other people were running into the same thing.)
I stopped trying to get it to work and accepted FRAPs' performance hit rather than deal with it.
ShadowPlay, then, came to me like mana from heaven. Not only does it work flawlessly, and I do mean flawlessly, on every game I've tested it with (provided Desktop Capture is enabled), but it also enables me to capture straight desktop footage, which has allowed me to start doing tutorials on video editing, and pretty soon here, I'll use it's F@#$%ing AMAZING Twitch integration to start livestreaming my animation process.
I have never seen an all-in-one solution so dang slick as this. So long as I'm in Twitch mode, all I do is hit Alt+F8, no matter what I'm doing, and BOOM. I'm live on the internet. JUST LIKE THAT.
And as a video editor, the degree of control ShadowPlay allows over the capture's resolution, bitrate, and framerate make me weep manly tears of joy. Most useful of the controls is setting the Resolution to "In-game", which automatically detects what the main desktop is running at and records that resolution. I have a 16:10 main monitor, so this allows me to record at the highly uncommon (nowadays) 1920x1200 resolution without having black bars on either side (formerly a problem when recording 1080p while displaying 1200p), meaning I can still edit that down to 1080p without a loss of quality. This also helps with games that aren't compatible with 16:9 monitors (Five Night's At Freddy's, anyone?), or that can only output in a certain subset of resolutions (Knights of the Old Republic, if unpatched). It can also record at a completely separate resolution from what is actually being displayed, so things DON'T have to match up perfectly in order for it to capture.
Oh, and you know that Dynamic Super Resolution thing they keep showing off? Where you can downsample a 4k game render to a 1080p monitor?
That resolution extends into ShadowPlay. And what THIS means is actually quite an impressive technological feat, in my personal opinion....
You can play a 4k downsampled game on a 1080p monitor, BUT STILL BE RECORDING IT IN 4K.
AND AT SIXTY FRIGGIN' FRAMES A SECOND, TOO.
Even if you don't have a 4k monitor to play it back on, this could allow you to zoom in on your gameplay feed and still maintain full 1080p resolution without it looking pixelated and nasty.
Also, I have the latest Adobe Creative Cloud installed, and it accelerates both Premiere Pro AND Illustrator like a DREAM. The Mercury Engine just purrs right along on this baby; Adobe and CUDA are a match made in heaven.
Adobe and AMD, on the other hand.... let's just say Adobe left for the bathroom and hasn't come back for a while.
Editors will also benefit greatly from the granular color controls for each monitor. Not only is the interface more accessible, easier to navigate, and with more settings open to adjustment, but Nvidia has INCREDIBLY helpful tooltips built in to the program that do an excellent job of explaining what each setting is, what it effects, and a list of problems that might stem from a certain setting in need of adjustment.
Quite simply, one of the most overwhelmingly positive experiences I've had with any single computer part upgrade, and I've been in computers for a while now. Good on ya, Team Green. You sure as hell made convert outta me.
[FOR THOSE HAVING TROUBLE WITH SHADOWPLAY IN-GAME VOLUME BEING TOO LOUD / UNABLE TO HEAR YOUR MIC]
1. In GeForce Experience, click ShadowPlay in the upper-right. Make sure the right-most box, "Audio" is set to "In-game & microphone".
2. Either start streaming or begin capturing (I only ever use Manual Mode, for my purposes).
3. Right-click the Windows volume icon and click "Open Volume Mixer".
4. You may have to widen the window or scroll to the right, but there should be an application listed there named "NVIDIA Capture Server".
5. Lowering the volume meter for it will lower how loud the capture will be recorded, relative to the microphone audio.
6. If it's still not working, try increasing your microphone's record volume at the same time, and make sure you have it set as the default recording device.
I personally use a solution where I route both my computer audio and microphone through a Xenyx Q502USB soundboard, so that I can have physical controls for the commentary and game audio volumes, in addition to recording them simultaneously (for webcam sync purposes - SUPER handy). This also lets me hear exactly how loud my voice will be compared to the game audio, without having to worry about post-production mixing. (If I can hear myself while recording it live, then I'll be able to hear myself when I play it back.)
Therefore, in my own setup, I set my default recording device to the soundboard, and mute the NVIDIA Capture Server altogether. I then record audio off the soundboard using Audacity, and enable ShadowPlay in-game. This is mostly due to the fact that the audio is INCREDIBLY compressed, due to how Nvidia accesses the recording device. But, as luck would have it, the Nvidia card can capture audio from the same device as Audacity, and neither program misses a beat! However they managed that, it's nifty as hell, because the USB mixer ensures that the waveform for my audio capture, my video game capture, AND my camera (A GoPro Hero4 Black, recording audio through it's 3.5mm input adapter) are all virtually identical!! When you're trying to sync up 3 different files every single time you edit a video, I cannot even BEGIN to describe how streamlined that makes the entire process. They're all getting the same audio waveform (albeit of varying qualities), which makes it a cinch to just line it all up.
