v3.3.1 — Instant replay on laptops and super-ultrawides

Instant replay on laptops, machines with two graphics cards, and super-ultrawide monitors. On an ordinary desktop with one graphics card, nothing changes.

Recording on the graphics card that drives your screen

The recorder used to take whichever graphics card Windows listed first. On a desktop with one card
that is the only one there is. On a laptop it often is not: the built-in screen is usually driven by
the processor's integrated graphics, the HDMI port is often wired to the separate card, and which of
the two Windows lists first depends on its graphics settings for the app, not on where your screen is
connected. When the recorder picked the wrong one, Windows still delivered every frame, but it had
to copy each one from one card to the other through system memory, at your screen's full refresh
rate. That is exactly the cost the recorder is built to avoid.

It now works on the card your monitor is plugged into, and it only tries the video encoders that
belong to that card. On a laptop with Intel or AMD graphics next to an NVIDIA or AMD card, the first
encoder it tried used to be the other card's, and was often refused. Both choices fall back to the
old behaviour if they come up empty.

The card in use is named in the recorder's log, %LOCALAPPDATA%\clipper\capture.log, on the
capturing … line. This was built and checked against the documented behaviour, but it has only
been run on a single-card desktop, so if replay misbehaves on your laptop, that line is the thing to
send along.

Super-ultrawide monitors stay on the graphics card

Graphics card video encoders stop at 4096 pixels across for the format Clipper records in, whether
they are NVIDIA's, AMD's or Intel's. A 5120×1440 monitor at the Ultra or Native quality asked
for 5120, so every encoder on the card refused it, and the recorder quietly fell back to Windows'
software encoder. That meant 1440p at 60 fps encoded on the same processor your game is using, with
every frame copied back off the graphics card to get there.

Those monitors now record at 4096×1152 on the graphics card: a fifth less width, but none of the
game's frame rate. Any monitor up to 4K records at the same size as before.

The newest frame, every time

When Windows had two frames waiting, the recorder used to take the older one. It now takes the
newest and drops the rest, so the picture never trails the sound by a frame.