Well my friends, since Windows 10 is right around in the corner, and indeed it looks like the current build 10240 is the RTM build, let us talk about one of the more interesting features in the new OS: The Xbox App or more specifically, the Game DVR function within the Xbox App.
I've been testing this out over the last few days and here are my observations:
- When set on high quality capture and high resolution (1080p), the quality seems almost on par with Nvidia Shadowplay. I uploaded a couple of sample videos to youtube, you can view them here:
- I noticed that the quality of the ESO video I uploaded seems better - crisper - than the Witcher 3 video. I don't know why this is, as far as I recall they are using the same Game Capture settings.
- I'm using a Creative SoundBlaster Recon3D sound card. If I set the audio to anything other than Stereo, the audio will not be captured by Game DVR. I submitted this on the Win 10 feedback app.
- I observed no framerate loss during the recording on both games. It seems like very small overhead for the actual recording function, just like Shadowplay. However, the recordings do not seem as smooth as what I was playing - perhaps there's a frame rate cap on recordings?
- I noticed that if I leave Background Recording on, after a while my PC will crash - either the video driver crashes or I get a hard lock on the PC. When I turn it off that goes away. Doing manual recordings does not seem to impact anything - no crashes.
- On the latest build of the Xbox App, there is now an option to share your Game DVR recordings on Xbox Live (presumably to the same place that Upload on the XB1 sends recordings). However both Witcher 3 and ESO came back with "didn't recognize this game" so the app would not let me upload them. Hopefully support for current games will be added as time goes on.
Has anyone else tried using this? What's your feedback? I'm not sure that it's better than Shadowplay, I still have a hunch that Shadowplay provides better quality though it may be a small difference. The integration options with Game DVR are nice especially if they start allowing uploads directly to Xbox Live.
I've been testing this out over the last few days and here are my observations:
- When set on high quality capture and high resolution (1080p), the quality seems almost on par with Nvidia Shadowplay. I uploaded a couple of sample videos to youtube, you can view them here:
- I noticed that the quality of the ESO video I uploaded seems better - crisper - than the Witcher 3 video. I don't know why this is, as far as I recall they are using the same Game Capture settings.
- I'm using a Creative SoundBlaster Recon3D sound card. If I set the audio to anything other than Stereo, the audio will not be captured by Game DVR. I submitted this on the Win 10 feedback app.
- I observed no framerate loss during the recording on both games. It seems like very small overhead for the actual recording function, just like Shadowplay. However, the recordings do not seem as smooth as what I was playing - perhaps there's a frame rate cap on recordings?
- I noticed that if I leave Background Recording on, after a while my PC will crash - either the video driver crashes or I get a hard lock on the PC. When I turn it off that goes away. Doing manual recordings does not seem to impact anything - no crashes.
- On the latest build of the Xbox App, there is now an option to share your Game DVR recordings on Xbox Live (presumably to the same place that Upload on the XB1 sends recordings). However both Witcher 3 and ESO came back with "didn't recognize this game" so the app would not let me upload them. Hopefully support for current games will be added as time goes on.
Has anyone else tried using this? What's your feedback? I'm not sure that it's better than Shadowplay, I still have a hunch that Shadowplay provides better quality though it may be a small difference. The integration options with Game DVR are nice especially if they start allowing uploads directly to Xbox Live.
Perhaps there is a built-in upper limit that I'm not aware of.