guide · windows
Recording gameplay on a PC
Three tools between them cover every situation, and choosing badly is why people end up with stuttering footage or a file nothing will accept. Here is which does what.
Choosing quickly
| Situation | Tool |
|---|---|
| Something fast, nothing to install | Xbox Game Bar |
| Capture a moment that already passed | GPU instant replay |
| Control over quality and layout | OBS Studio |
Xbox Game Bar
Windows and G opens the overlay; Windows, Alt and R starts and stops recording. It is already installed and requires no decisions, which is the entire case for it.
Its boundaries appear quickly. The desktop and File Explorer are off limits, Windows decides unilaterally whether your program qualifies as a game, and quality is barely adjustable. For two minutes of something that just happened, none of that registers.
The recorder that came with your graphics card
Both major manufacturers bundle capture software with their drivers, and both offer something Game Bar handles poorly: a rolling buffer of the last several minutes, so a moment can be saved after it has already gone.
NVIDIA hardware has this in the NVIDIA app, successor to GeForce Experience. AMD hardware has it in Adrenalin. The naming varies around the phrase instant replay, and it is the correct tool for highlights, since nobody presses record in anticipation of something good.
On recent cards the performance cost is minor, because encoding happens on dedicated circuitry rather than the portion of the GPU drawing your game. On older hardware it is noticeable, and the remedy is a lower capture resolution rather than abandoning the feature.
OBS Studio
Free, captures anything on the display, and hands you real control over resolution, frame rate, bitrate and composition. It is also the only one of the three that lets you construct a layout — game, camera, overlay — instead of recording whatever happens to be shown.
What it costs is a setup session. OBS asks you to make choices the other two make silently, and its defaults lean toward streaming rather than recording.
Two settings matter far more than the rest. Select a hardware encoder so the work happens on the graphics card rather than competing with the game for processor time. And record into MKV rather than MP4, because a crash partway through leaves an MKV playable and an MP4 broken.
Recording to MKV for safety means converting afterwards, since editors and platforms generally prefer MP4. That conversion normally repackages the file rather than re-encoding it, so it costs seconds and no quality.
Settings that determine the result
Frame rate first. Sixty is worth having for anything fast; thirty is perfectly adequate for slower material and considerably gentler on file size. Recording above what the game actually produces achieves nothing whatsoever.
Resolution second, and downward is frequently correct. Capturing at 1080p while playing at 1440p costs almost nothing perceptible once the footage is viewed on a phone or inside a chat window, while reducing both size and encoding load.
Bitrate third, where recording allows generosity that streaming does not, since no upload connection is involved. Twenty to forty megabits at 1080p60 leaves ample room for editing later.
Why nothing you record will fit anywhere
This is the part nobody mentions in advance. A minute at 1080p60 lands routinely between eighty and two hundred megabytes, which exceeds most chat platforms, most mail servers and a fair number of upload forms.
Gameplay does compress unusually well, though. Interface elements, backgrounds and menus barely alter between frames, and unchanging regions are almost free.
Cut to the seconds that mattered before anything else — nothing else you do affects size as much, so start with the video trimmer.
For a Discord server specifically, the presets aimed at its caps live in compress for Discord.
For TikTok, Reels or Shorts the clip also needs reframing to vertical, which is crop video.
Performance, stated honestly
Every recorder costs something. With a hardware encoder on a reasonably recent card it is a handful of frames per second, which most people never detect. With software encoding it can be brutal, since the processor is then running the game and the encode simultaneously.
If capture makes a game stutter, verify the encoder selection before altering anything else. That one setting explains the majority of performance complaints, and it is easy to leave wrong because software encoding produces marginally better quality per megabyte and is occasionally the default.
Common questions
What is the simplest way to record gameplay?
Xbox Game Bar, already in Windows. Windows with Alt and R starts and stops it.
How do I capture something that already happened?
Instant replay in the NVIDIA app or AMD Adrenalin keeps a rolling buffer you can save retroactively.
Will recording cost me frames?
With a hardware encoder, a few. With software encoding, considerably more, because the processor handles both jobs.
What settings should I use?
1080p at 60 frames and roughly 20 to 40 megabits suits most footage. Recording above the game's actual frame rate gains nothing.
Why is the file too large to share?
1080p60 runs about 80 to 200 MB per minute. Trim first, then compress — game footage compresses very well.