NVIDIA ShadowPlay Aims For Always-On Screen Recording For Gamers

In a move that most gamers will instantly see as a battle up against FRAPS, NVIDIA has this week shown off ShadowPlay, a screen capture feature for the future of the GeForce Experience. Before you get too excited, it's important to note that ShadowPlay will not be implemented until later this summer with an update to the GeForce Experience – for now you'll have to wait and wish for this optimized setup.

ShadowPlay will be a feature inside the NVIDIA GeForce Experience that'll be working with all Kepler GPUs inside Summer 2013. NVIDIA has made this system out to be a system that more than takes on FRAPS, it out-does it: ShadowPlay takes a minimal performance hit so gamers can play with minimal draw on their system whilst playing.

While we'll have to wait for this system to roll out to actually test that claim, at the moment what we're being told by the company seems to be as easy to use as the GeForce Experience game optimization system itself.

ShadowPlay uses the H.264 video encoder built-in to every Kepler GPU to "seamlessly" record the users last 20 minutes of gameplay footage, 20 minutes at a time. With the driver you've got built-in to the Kepler graphics card already in your machine, this system will be able to run all the time, while you pick up the segments of video you want and the rest are dumped.

This ShadowPlay system's pre-set 20-minute segments are the current optimized pre-set lengths that each video will be recorded in. This amount of time is not set in stone – NVIDIA may change before the final release – but for now, the company says it's the best amount of time based on their testing of the feature.