Shadowplay now has: integrated twitch streaming

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xoleras

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Pretty awesome stuff -

http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/GeForce-Experience-181-Released-Twitch-Streaming

Another update to GeForce Experience brings another anticipated ShadowPlay feature. The ability to stream live gameplay to Twitch, hardware accelerated by Kepler, was demoed at the NVIDIA event in Montreal from late October. They showed Batman Origins streaming at 1080p 60FPS without capping or affecting the in-game output settings.

GeForce Experience 1.8.1 finally brings that feature, in beta of course, to the general public. When set up, Alt + F8 will launch the Twitch stream and Alt + F6 will activate your webcam. Oh, by the way, one feature they kept from us (or at least me) is the ability to overlay your webcam atop your gameplay.

Nice touch NVIDIA.

Of course the upstream bandwidth requirements of video are quite high: 3.5Mbps on the top end, a more common 2Mbps happy medium, and a 0.75Mbps minimum. NVIDIA has been trying to ensure that your machine will not lag but there's nothing a GPU can do about your internet connection.

GeForce Experience 1.8.1 is available now at the GeForce website.
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After all this time they've only managed to copy one feature that's been available in OBS for months...
Now they need to work on Per-scene volume control, mic noise gating, and external device video capture.
 
Lorien said:
After all this time they've only managed to copy one feature that's been available in OBS for months...
Now they need to work on Per-scene volume control, mic noise gating, and external device video capture.
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Fortunately nvidia didn't copy the OBS feature of using dragging your CPU into the ground and having ridiculous resource utilization. ;)

For the rest of us with quad cores, yeah, shadowplay is where it's at. It is superior to OBS in that respect. As far as the other things you mention, i'd venture that NV is working on it.
 
I was considering putting this in that thread I made earlier on Shadowplay but yeah. Here it is. This is gonna probably make a lot of LoL players happier. Painless and resourceless Twitch streaming.
 
Nvidia will be the default choice for professional SC2: Hots/LoL and Dota 2 players I would think. This is huge for those guys.
 
xoleras said:
Fortunately nvidia didn't copy the OBS feature of using dragging your CPU into the ground and having ridiculous resource utilization. ;)
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That's a very nice straw man you got there. OBS works exactly the same way Nvidia's copycat app works except it's not proprietary. In fact it has more features since OBS uses X264 instead of Nvidia's hardware encoder which is known to offer inferior image quality. OBS also supports Intel's quicksync so I find your rambling about eating resources simply false.

For the rest of us with quad cores, yeah, shadowplay is where it's at. It is superior to OBS in that respect. As far as the other things you mention, i'd venture that NV is working on it.
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Nope, there are features that they simply won't be able to match. They can't even do simple stuff like scrolling text in the stream lol.
 
Uhm. Okay?

You sound pretty upset about free features with nvidia's software ecosystem. By all means use OBS. I'm assuming you're using AMD hardware which would make OBS the default choice despite the resource utilization issues. By the way, the resource issues with OBS are a fact. A lot of twitch.tv streamers use hexa core CPUs precisely because of this reason, while shadowplay doesn't have this issue. I also feel that nvidia is working on continually evolving shadowplay, so i'm sure it will have many more features when all is said and done - nvidia is pretty good (very good) on the software side IMO.

That said, use whatever you like. It's cool. ;) Personally I find shadowplay awesome, but you're free to disagree. It's just an added perk for nvidia cards and I personally find it cool. It isn't for everyone , though.
 
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Xoleras, I think you don't understand. If you have an Intel CPU, you can use the GPU on it to render using QuickSync. OBS allows your unused GPU on say a 4770K to render the video for you. It doesn't affect your CPU load and is essentially a freebie for Intel owners.

OBS also allows AMD users to render on their video cards using OpenCL. So AMD users can choose to do the rendering on their CPU or GPU. Mantle might even allow the load to be balanced dynamically.

At any rate it's nice to see that Nvidia finally has something like this for their cards that OBS provided for free to Intel and AMD users via X264 as Lorien mentioned above. :)

Oh and OBS isn't a resource hog. XSplit is from what I understand. I skipped trying XSplit since OBS was free and open source unlike XSplit.
 
I have actually been waiting for this for a while now, can't wait to see how they continue to develop it!
 
Nice that they are doing it, but don't pretend like it is something revolutionary and new. That is all :)
 
cageymaru said:
Xoleras, I think you don't understand. If you have an Intel CPU, you can use the GPU on it to render using QuickSync. OBS allows your unused GPU on say a 4770K to render the video for you. It doesn't affect your CPU load and is essentially a freebie for Intel owners.
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Doesn't work for p67 chipset users though?

Don't record/stream so don't follow this as much.
 
Doesn't matter if some Intel cpu's support something comparable or not. Really the nice thing is that Shadowplay by itself is great. Painless, encoded recording 10-20 minutes back or an unlimited time going forward. Now, you can just use it to Stream as well. It's basically a consolidated set of features now, so it's very likely that the way your FPS and whatnot is when you're recording.. is the exact same way it's going to be when you're streaming. So, you end up with one tool that can now do many things at the press of a button, with negligible consequences across the board.

I like where they're going with this, and I think they're only getting started.
 
You will get lag if you stream to Twitch. And how is it not important that we've had this for a few years now?
 
From quick testing it works quite well. One let down is it will only broadcast in game and in full screen mode only (at least from 15 min of fiddling around with it)
 
xIronCrossx said:
You will get lag if you stream to Twitch. And how is it not important that we've had this for a few years now?
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Because it's an addition to an already good piece of software that has its own merits? Let me turn your question around, too. Why is it important to point out that this software has been out? It's like saying "Ah, Chatzilla came out for my Firefox, but we've already had IRC clients for ages so it must suck to have a painless plugin to my favorite browser function as an easy-to-use well-featured IRC client".

Also, from what I saw of those bandwidth numbers, you'll only lag if your connection sucks. 3.5mbps? That's like under 400 kB/s upload. Nvidia just added painless streaming to painless, powerful in-game recording. Boohoo, it must suck because alternatives exist to one part of the package.
 
limitedaccess said:
Doesn't work for p67 chipset users though?

Don't record/stream so don't follow this as much.
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Download the Open Broadcaster Software package.
Under the Settings tab choose Advanced.
Put a check into "Use Quick Sync".
That's about it. :)

If you're having issues with it, the guys on the OBS forums will help you. You do need the Intel drivers to enable it according to this series of posts that you might find helpful.
https://obsproject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7238

Also you can use OBS as a super high quality FRAPS alternative. Say you have a 1600p monitor, but want 1080p video to upload to Youtube. OBS will transcode your game footage on the fly to the lower resolution for you and save it to your HD. Very slick open source package. And it's free of course. :)
 
DOn't forget that things like FRAPS (and possibly OBS) will not work with G-Sync, so if you are getting G_Sync display, Shadowplay will be the only thing to record the games.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Doesn't matter if some Intel cpu's support something comparable or not. Really the nice thing is that Shadowplay by itself is great. Painless, encoded recording 10-20 minutes back or an unlimited time going forward. Now, you can just use it to Stream as well. It's basically a consolidated set of features now, so it's very likely that the way your FPS and whatnot is when you're recording.. is the exact same way it's going to be when you're streaming. So, you end up with one tool that can now do many things at the press of a button, with negligible consequences across the board.

I like where they're going with this, and I think they're only getting started.
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I was only trying to be helpful by showing the Intel guys a way to completely off load their streaming and capturing needs onto their iGPU that's never used. I honestly was trying to be helpful as I had to figure this out of my own a couple years ago when I started dabbling with streaming.

I think it's neat that ShadowPlay exists, and Nvidia needs to come up with more alternative uses for their cards as they are powerful just like the AMD cards are that having been doing this for awhile using OBS. I like the fact that it's also easy to do with Nvidia cards. Kudos to them.
 
cageymaru said:
Download the Open Broadcaster Software package.
Under the Settings tab choose Advanced.
Put a check into "Use Quick Sync".
That's about it. :)

If you're having issues with it, the guys on the OBS forums will help you. You do need the Intel drivers to enable it according to this series of posts that you might find helpful.
https://obsproject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7238

Also you can use OBS as a super high quality FRAPS alternative. Say you have a 1600p monitor, but want 1080p video to upload to Youtube. OBS will transcode your game footage on the fly to the lower resolution for you and save it to your HD. Very slick open source package. And it's free of course. :)
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I'll experiment with it out of curiosity when I put my PC back together. No GPU a the moment at all (sold the 7950), so I'm currently below minimum requirements not just in terms of slow internet :p

But the issue I mentioned is because the P67 chipset was an early release with Sandy Bridge. At the time your choices were a chipset that allowed unlocked multipliers or IGP support not both, this was before the release of Z67. So I was wondering if that would be an issue.

Does OBS, or some alternative, have a feature similar to the actual Shadowplay function (the DVR type, not sure the best term, recording)? I'm not really interested in steaming or actual set recording but it might be interesting to have that kind of recap function sometimes and just leave it on (since I have multiple drives to lower I/O impact in that area).
 
Well its nice but currently its very bugged.

1. It cuts out after 10-60 seconds and restarts your stream. Its a confirmed issue for many people.

2. Its bugged with certain recent drivers (331.82) that cause Shadowplay to spike CPU usage to +20 percent. Using older drivers puts the CPU usage down to 0-2 percent.

3. The quality is sub par. Compared to OBS it looks like a slightly better than average PS4 stream using Twitch. Considering when it works right its only using 0-2 percent of the total CPU makes it almost acceptable.

4. You can not use it unless you are fullscreen. Absolutely crazy not to include windowed/borderless even in a beta. People have so many reasons to alt-tab during live streaming. This is a pretty unreasonable compromise.

So while Shadowplay is great for capturing up to 20 minutes of your recent gameplay at 1080p at 60fps its totally lacking as a Twitch streaming vehicle. It needs at least a few months of updates to really make it viable. It is a beta so most of this is forgivable. But do not buy an Nvidia card thinking you can stream to Twitch out of the box. OBS is still king.
 
Pretty sure they will listen to the community, desktop capture is coming etc. It's a work in progress. I use it all the time to record fun moments in bf4.. Even if it doesn't grab in 1440p witch is. My native resolution it's still great..
 
Godmachine said:
Well its nice but currently its very bugged.

1. It cuts out after 10-60 seconds and restarts your stream. Its a confirmed issue for many people.

2. Its bugged with certain recent drivers (331.82) that cause Shadowplay to spike CPU usage to +20 percent. Using older drivers puts the CPU usage down to 0-2 percent.

3. The quality is sub par. Compared to OBS it looks like a slightly better than average PS4 stream using Twitch. Considering when it works right its only using 0-2 percent of the total CPU makes it almost acceptable.

4. You can not use it unless you are fullscreen. Absolutely crazy not to include windowed/borderless even in a beta. People have so many reasons to alt-tab during live streaming. This is a pretty unreasonable compromise.

So while Shadowplay is great for capturing up to 20 minutes of your recent gameplay at 1080p at 60fps its totally lacking as a Twitch streaming vehicle. It needs at least a few months of updates to really make it viable. It is a beta so most of this is forgivable. But do not buy an Nvidia card thinking you can stream to Twitch out of the box. OBS is still king.
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I streamed Battlefield 4 & Sanctum 2 all last night using ShadowPlay, and didn't notice 1 & 2 at all. In fact, my performance really didn't change at all (CPU or GPU wise).

However, I was rather unimpressed with the streaming quality as stated in 3. It worked more or less flawlessly for me, but the amount of encoding and motion artifacts was significant. It looked like a very low bitrate / grainy 720p stream when any motion was present.

The stream cutting out whenever you alt tabbed was a bit of an annoyance, and is something they will definitely need to work on. Most people stream in borderless windowed mode (LoL, SC2, MMO's, etc), and this feature is basically a must have.

I am looking forward to the improvements they make to this software over time. I think we need more software options with hardware encoding available in this sector, and this is a good start from a big name. XSplit is too expensive compared to OBS (which is free), and both of those have some unique problems as well.

This was using 780's on Windows 8.1 with the newest drivers.
 
I streamed a bit with it last night and my gripes are mostly the same as others:

First Positives:
1) Extremely easy to use. Just hit Alt+F8 to instantly stream and Alt+F6 to enable your camera.

2) Minimal performance hit of 5-8% which is acceptable considering most other options (excluding a dedicated streaming PC of course) can be as bad as 20-30%+.

Now for the Negatives:
1) Only works with games in full screen mode. This was a pain since my stream cut out every time I changed servers in Battlefield 4. Hoping they change it so it just records what is on the screen at all times.

2) Not able to change the frames or layout of the stream. Extremely limits the creativity you can work with. I'm hoping that they allow ShadowPlay and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to eventually be used together.

3) The streaming quality is bad. Even at "high" settings the stream looks very low quality. I'm pretty sure it broadcasts at 720p/30 with a low bitrate causing a LOT of motion artifacts and encoding compression. It is very similar to the streaming quality of a PS4 at "best" quality settings...which is not good.

I know that Nvidia said that Twitch streaming is still considered to be in BETA so I can't complain too much. If they allow for greater customization of streaming quality and layout while at the same time allowing for desktop recording then they will have hit a home run. Until then, I'll have a hard time recommending ShadowPlay for anyone remotely serious in streaming.
 
Nvidia is continuously working on this no worries. They have a powerful software/driver team. Can't wait for their next update :)
 
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