Thread: AMD's Answer to Shadowplay

AnandTech Portal | Hands On With AMD

It's a pretty poor implementation of their encoder, as you have to go through Raptr's bulky interface, but the open source community has already figured out how to use the VCE encoder independently.

Enter OBS, Open Broadcasting Software. You're supposed to use it to stream video games and the like, but it's a flexible enough program that you can use it to record just about anything. There's an experimental VCE encoder that one of the forum members threw up and I'm giving it a shot. So far, its recording quality is equal to x264 on the superfast preset, which means very little blockiness. Trying to record at near-lossless (ie. letting the encoder decide how many Kb/s it needs to use) imparts only a 15% GPU resource penalty to my HD 7870, which uses a previous generation VCE encoder.

That being said, when you try to use it to record at near-lossless, the encoder is very liberal with how large the file size is going to get: One 33 minute video of BF4 totals out to 27 GB @ 114,235 Kb/s. The video quality is absolutely amazing, but I was able to run it through Handbrake and bring the bitrate to 11,000 Kb/s with a 98% video quality retention. (For those interested, the 2% quality loss manifests as some very slight blurriness on details; you wouldn't notice if you hadn't seen the source video)

Edit: Forgot to mention that OBS has "official" (As in, the release builds allow for it, not just experimental support) NVENC support, which is the GPU encoder that Nvidia uses for Shadowplay. Whether or not you can exceed the normal buffer time limit using the encoder through OBS, I don't know, because I don't have an Nvidia GPU.

TLDR: The interesting thing is, the official implementation offers a basic implementation of a buffered video recording similar to Shadowplay. Under the 1920x1080@60fps setup, you can have a buffer as short as 10s, or as long as 1m 30s. All with similar quality to a competent x264 preset and only a GPU overhead.