What You Need

What you need

ShadePlay guide › Getting started

What your PC needs for ShadePlay: Windows, a graphics card with a video encoder, the monitor on that card, some free memory, and disk space for the clips you keep.

Windows

• Windows 11 (tested). Windows 10 version 2004 or newer installs and should work, but is untested. Setup refuses older versions of Windows 10, because recording one program's sound (the game and voice chat tracks) needs version 2004.
• A 64-bit Intel or AMD processor. Windows on Arm is not supported: those PCs have no graphics card encoder ShadePlay can use, so Setup refuses to install there.

A graphics card with a video encoder

ShadePlay never compresses video on the processor. It uses the video encoder built into the graphics card that drives your monitor.

Graphics card	Codecs ShadePlay can record	Status
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and 50 series	AV1 (the default), HEVC, H.264	Supported; an RTX 50 card is the tested one
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series and newer, without AV1 (for example RTX 20 and 30)	HEVC, H.264	Should work. ShadePlay switches from AV1 to HEVC by itself
AMD Radeon RX 7000 and 9000 series	AV1, HEVC, H.264	Experimental
AMD Radeon RX 6000 series	HEVC, H.264	Experimental
Intel Arc	AV1, HEVC, H.264	Experimental

• NVIDIA: driver version 570 or newer. ShadePlay's FFmpeg is built for NVIDIA's encoder interface 13.0, which needs it.
• Experimental means the same design, but recording on those cards has not been tested yet. The built-in encoder test tells you, and us, how your card does: Testing AMD and Intel graphics.
• More in Graphics cards and encoders.

Your monitor on that graphics card

Plug the monitor into the graphics card, not into the motherboard. ShadePlay records with the graphics card that drives the monitor it records. A monitor on the motherboard's socket is driven by the processor's built-in graphics, so that encoder would be used instead (or none at all).

Memory for the replay

The replay is kept in memory (RAM), never on your drive:

• about 250 MB for the recorder itself;
• plus the replay: from a few hundred MB on a quiet desktop to about 2.5 GB for a minute of fast action at 2560 × 1440, 240 fps, HDR and the default quality;
• never more than a quarter of your RAM. If a long buffer at high quality would need more, clips get shorter and ShadePlay says so (buffer length).

Disk space for your clips

Nothing is written to your drive until you save a clip. Before each save, ShadePlay checks that the clips folder's drive has room for the whole replay plus 256 MB. If not, the clip is not saved and a notification says Not enough free disk space in <folder>. How big clips get: file sizes.

Optional

• Discord desktop app, for the voice chat track. The call in a browser tab is not on that track (it is in the sound of the device you listen on).
• A microphone, for the mic track. No microphone is fine: the status then says (no mic connected).

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Next: Installing ShadePlay

See also: Graphics cards and encoders · Performance and memory · Monitors and displays