The main and the real performance penalty for videocapture application is … a simple process of capturing frames from DirectX application.

In other words, having fast hardware encoder like NVENC or Intel QuickSync simply allows you to encode better quality video with higher encoding framerate or more efficient compression ratio in realtime, but it doesn’t seriously minimize videocapture related performance hit like many reviewers say. That is why when you’re capturing video in the game which is not using close to 100% of CPU time on all CPU cores, background video encoding have enough system resources to run in parallel and hardly affects game performance. Modern videocapture applications are multithreaded and modern CPUs have multiple cores able to process multiple tasks in parallel, so realtime video encoding is normally performed in background thread(s) and often with lower priority. That is quite typical and mostly wrong assumption. Most of users (and surprisingly reviewers) assume that the main performance hit for any videocapture oriented software comes from realtime video encoding. I’ve read a lot of reviews related to NVIDIA ShadowPlay during the last couple days and there are typical misunderstanding patterns in many of them, so I decided to write this short summary to give you better understanding, guys.

Nvfbc capture