From the old days of Bandicam and FRAPS to more recent implementation in the form of Windows Game Bar, NVIDIA ShadowPlay or AMD Radeon ReLive, in-game video recording tools has come in many different forms – however, Steam’s newly-introduced Game Recording feature may be the one to rule them all.
Steam Game Recording
The Steam Game Recording feature has recently exited beta status, meaning all users on macOS, PC, and Steam Deck will see the feature available once updated. Its implementation does come with better integration with games, since it’s not just a simple press-to-record ordeal: some games like Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 also supports features like game mode indicators and event markers, and the SDK is open to other developers to implement them into their games as well.
The entire interface is streamlined to allow for quick editing, easy sharing and exporting to MP4 files, and Valve says all clips are saved “in an optimized Steam timeline format for snappier, smoother replays.” Background recording also supports up to 120 minutes, saved in the disk drive of your choosing (it will occupy several gigabytes on your disk with two hours’ worth of footage).
Better yet, this feature will work in virtually any game – including non-Steam ones – as long as Steam Overlay is enabled. Valve also notes that it won’t record anything beyond the in-game screen, though system audio may be captured (useful if you want your comms to be recorded), and all of this is done with dedicated encoders from discrete GPUs to minimize performance impact. If no dGPU is present, it’ll fall back to using CPU for encoding, though this naturally comes with performance penalties.
Pokdepinion: Now this might be the one that makes me finally enable background recording for games.
