Performance and Memory

Performance and memory

ShadePlay guide › Your hardware

What ShadePlay costs your PC while it records, as measured on the test PC, and why it is light.

Measured

On the test PC (AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, a 2560 × 1440 monitor at 240 fps with HDR, AV1, the default quality):

	While recording
Processor	about 0.9 % of the whole processor (about 14 % of one core). Saving a clip adds a burst of about a second in the background.
Graphics card	the compression runs on the card's separate video engine, about 30 % busy. The extra graphics work (colour conversion) is about 0.05 ms per frame.
Memory	about 250 MB for the recorder, plus the replay (below).
Start	recording within half a second of starting.
Saving	a 60-second clip saves in 3 to 4 seconds, in the background, while you keep playing.
Smoothness	over a full minute at 240 fps, 3 of about 14,600 frames came late.

Not measured yet: the effect on a game's frame rate. A test with and without ShadePlay is planned, and its result will be added here.

Why it is light

• The picture never passes through the processor. Windows hands each new screen image to ShadePlay on the graphics card; a small graphics program converts its colours there, and the card's video engine compresses it. The engine is a separate part of the chip, next to the part that draws your game.
• Sound is cheap: recording it takes a small share of one core, and it is compressed only when you save.
• Priorities fit a game: capture runs at high priority so it never stutters, and saving runs at low priority (and in Windows' power-saving mode for background work) so it never takes time from your game.
• The graphics card's scheduling priority is raised to high, never to real-time, so capture stays smooth when a game loads the card. You can set it back to normal in Video settings.

Memory

The replay lives in memory. It holds the compressed video and sound of your buffer length plus about 8 seconds of margin, so what it needs follows the bitrate:

• a few hundred MB on a quiet desktop;
• about 2.5 GB for a minute of fast action at 2560 × 1440, 240 fps, HDR and the default quality;
• more with a longer buffer, a higher quality, a higher resolution or frame rate.

ShadePlay never uses more than a quarter of your RAM for the replay (at least 512 MB). When it would need more, the oldest seconds are dropped and clips get shorter than your buffer length; the settings window and the tray menu say so. See Buffer length.

Your SSD

Nothing is written to your drive until you save a clip: the replay stays in memory, so recording all day doesn't wear out your SSD. Only the clips you keep (and small logs) are written.

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Next: Troubleshooting

See also: Quality, frame rate and buffer length · Graphics cards and encoders · What you need