Video Settings

Video settings

ShadePlay guide › Advanced settings

The advanced Video page: codec, frame rate, quality, HDR, the monitor and the encoder's details.

The settings

Setting	Choices	Default	What it does
Codec	AV1 (recommended), HEVC (H.265), H.264 (SDR, 8-bit only)	AV1	The video format. AV1 gives the best quality per bit on recent cards. HEVC works on older NVIDIA cards too. H.264 plays everywhere but is SDR and 8-bit only.
Frame rate	60, 120, 144, 240, 360 fps, or Custom… (10 to 500)	240	Frames per second in your clips.
Quality	Lite (smaller files), Default, High, Insane (very large files), Fixed bitrate	Default	The four levels are the settings page's slider. Fixed bitrate takes an average in Mb/s (5 to 2000) and peaks up to 1.5 times that.
HDR	HDR when Windows HDR is on, Always SDR (tone-mapped)	HDR when Windows HDR is on	See HDR clips.
Monitor	Primary monitor (<name>) or a monitor by name	Primary monitor	Which monitor is recorded. See Monitors and displays.
GPU priority	High (recommended), Normal	High	High keeps capture smooth while a game loads the graphics card. Never real-time.
10-bit SDR clips	on / off	on	Smoother gradients in SDR clips. HDR clips are always 10-bit; H.264 is always 8-bit.
Record the mouse cursor	on / off	on	Windows' screen capture doesn't include the pointer, so ShadePlay draws it into the picture itself.

The line under Quality says what the level means for your screen, for example Constant quality 27, peaks at up to 300 Mb/s (2560×1440, 240 fps, HDR). or, for a fixed bitrate, 150 Mb/s average, peaks at up to 225 Mb/s. How big clips get: Quality, frame rate and buffer length.

AV1 on a card without AV1

Graphics cards without an AV1 encoder (for example NVIDIA GeForce cards older than the RTX 40 series) record HEVC instead, by themselves. Once ShadePlay knows, AV1 is shown as AV1 (not on this GPU) and can't be picked, and the page says This GPU can’t encode AV1, so clips are recorded as HEVC. Your saved setting stays AV1, so a card swap needs no change.

Advanced

These change how the graphics card's encoder works. The defaults suit almost everyone.

Setting	Choices	Default	What it does
Encoder preset	Auto (recommended), or 1 (fastest) to 7 (best quality), shown with your card's own names (NVIDIA P1 to P7; AMD Speed, Balanced, Quality; Intel Fastest to Best)	Auto	The encoder's speed / quality trade-off. The line under it says what Auto picks, for example Auto uses P4 at 240 fps.; above 300 fps it adds , with split-frame encoding.
Keyframe interval	0.25 to 10 seconds	1	Seconds between keyframes. A clip starts at a keyframe, so shorter means more exact clip starts and a bit more file size.
Spatial AQ (adaptive quantization)	on / off	off	Spends more bits on flat areas. It made files 25-70 % bigger at the same quality in tests, and it uses the card's shader cores (a little of the game's graphics time). It is never used above 300 fps, where split-frame encoding needs it off.

Every change starts a new recording

Any change on this page restarts the encoder with the new settings as soon as it is saved (by itself, about half a second after your last change, or when you leave a box you typed in). The replay starts over for the new settings, and a clip never mixes two settings (Changes that start a new recording).

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Next: Audio settings

See also: Graphics cards and encoders · HDR clips · Quality, frame rate and buffer length