Anti Cheat and Games

Anti-Cheat and Games

"Will this get me banned?" is a fair question to ask of anything that runs next to your games. This page explains exactly what Flashback does and doesn't do around a game, why that keeps it clear of the things anti-cheat systems look for, and which games and window modes it works with.

Short version: Flashback records your monitor from outside the game. It never loads code into a game, never reads or writes game memory, never hooks the game's rendering, and never installs a keyboard or mouse hook. To the game, Flashback is just another desktop app.

What Flashback does near a game

Flashback...	How
Records the display, not the game	It asks Windows for the image of a monitor through Desktop Duplication or Windows Graphics Capture, the same Windows APIs screen-sharing apps use. The game's process isn't opened or touched.
Knows which game you're playing	It looks at which program is in front on the recorded display and reads that program's file path, for example ...\Steam\steamapps\common\<game>\game.exe. It never reads the game's memory.
Listens for your save shortcut	Through the standard Windows RegisterHotKey service. Windows tells Flashback when the shortcut is pressed; unless you turn on the input overlay, Flashback never sees your other keystrokes.
Draws the input overlay (only if you turn it on)	It reads key and mouse-button states with Windows Raw Input on a hidden, message-only window, only while the overlay is enabled. The overlay is drawn into an exported copy later, never on screen during play.
Shows a Discord status (optional)	It passes a status like "Instant replay ready" to the Discord app on your PC, which shows it on your profile. It never includes your game, and it never touches the game itself.

What Flashback never does

• No DLL injection and no in-game overlay. Nothing of Flashback's runs inside the game.
• No game-memory reads or writes.
• No rendering hooks. It doesn't intercept DirectX, Vulkan or OpenGL calls.
• No low-level keyboard or mouse hooks, and no input injection: it doesn't call SendInput, alter mouse or keyboard packets, or wait inside a game's input thread.
• No driver. Flashback installs for your Windows user only and doesn't need administrator access.

Those are the behaviors anti-cheat systems are designed to watch for. Flashback's design avoids all of them, which is also why the same capture path works for every game.

What we can't promise

Flashback can't speak for every anti-cheat vendor or game publisher. Their rules are their own and can change, and Flashback doesn't name any anti-cheat system as having certified it. What we can say is precisely what Flashback does, which is everything on this page. If a game's rules forbid screen recording in general, those rules apply to Flashback like any other recorder.

Games and window modes

Because Flashback records the display, one capture path covers:

• DirectX, Vulkan and OpenGL games.
• Java games, including shader-heavy Minecraft, and Bedrock Minecraft.
• Windowed, borderless and fullscreen modes.
• The plain desktop, browsers and other apps, filed under Desktop.

A few things to know:

• Protected content is black. Video that Windows marks as protected (for example from some streaming services) is blacked out for every screen recorder, Flashback included.
• A capture border can appear. If a session falls back to Windows Graphics Capture, Windows may draw its capture border. See Capture Pipeline.
• Second monitor. With Display set to Automatic, Flashback follows your game to the monitor it's on. See Capture Pipeline.

How games are recognized

The program in front on the recorded display decides the folder and filename, whether it's windowed, borderless or fullscreen.

• Well-known games are recognized directly.
• Games installed through Steam, Epic, Riot, Xbox, Battle.net, GOG, EA or Ubisoft, or in a folder named Games, count as games because of where they're installed.
• A program you gave a per-game profile counts as a game under the profile's name.
• Browsers, launchers, chat apps, the Windows shell and Flashback itself never count as games on their own.
• Anything else is filed under Desktop.

You can rename or refile recognized games with custom names, change the Desktop label, or turn recognition off. See Naming and Organization. If a game you play isn't recognized, give it a per-game profile, or send it through Getting Help so it can be added.

Performance in game

Display capture still uses some GPU, encoder, CPU, memory and disk bandwidth, so no recorder is literally free. Flashback keeps that cost small: in the published test it cost 5.9% average FPS, against 27.0% for Medal and 28.4% for NVIDIA ShadowPlay on the same PC (Flashback 0.6.22, one PC, one game). See Why Flashback Is Light and Benchmarks.

Related pages

Security · Privacy · Shortcuts · Overlays · Capture Pipeline