When it comes to recording screen on Windows 11 for gameplay, what recording tool will you turn to in the first place? OBS, Shadowplay, Fraps, or Relive, I guess. Windows users may even use the Windows built-in recorder. Although choices are quite selective out there, most users tend to go with OBS or Shadowplay for many reasons. Then, here comes the ultimate question: which should users employ when recording gameplay?
Shadowplay and OBS, renowned and sought-after by hundreds and thousands of customers, though, still have some shortcomings in between. For instance: when recording, overwhelming consumption of CPUs and graphic cards will degrade the actual image quality of gameplay, which easily irritates your visual experience.
Worse than that, when optimizing preset parameters, complicated parameter settings will drive novice users out of nowhere...Is there one friendly software that records gameplay in 1:1 whilst retaining high preset or has relatively intuitive settings?
Next, we will make thorough comparisons between Shadowplay and OBS by pros and cons reviews as well as detailed comparisons. Here's what we've observed, continue reading.
Shadowplay
If you Google to download Shadowplay, you will be disappointed as there isn't one search result that completely meets your needs. In fact, shadowplay is not the typical name of some entity software other than one noting feature in GeForce Experience by NVIDIA. With Shadowplay, you can not only download or upload consecutive footages of some high-streaming-consumption games but capture the missing moments in the passing 30 seconds maximally. There're 4 modes when making in-game recording: Shadow, Manual, Shadow & Manual (by default), and Twitch.
Pros
- 1:1 quality retained when recording
- Capture missing gaming moments
- GPU accelerated encoding by NVIDIA, fast in processing
- H.264 built-in encoder
- Lightweight software
- Free to acquire
Cons
- Only supported by Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10
- GeForce GTX 650 or above is required
- Limited games supporting
OBS
Open Broadcaster Software is one free and open-source tool for computer screen recording. Both software encoding (x264) and hardware encoding (H.264) are supported by OBS. The video contained in MP4, FLV, MKV, etc., these commonly used container formats, are supported in OBS, which makes it really popular among competitors on the market.
Pros
- GPU accelerated encoding
- MP4, FLV, MKV, and more video formats supported
- Free and open source
Cons
- Hard to adjust or customize preset parameters without a tutorial
- Encoding is overloaded when CPU encoding is exceeding computer capability
