Steam has just made it easier to share PC gaming videos. Here’s how

Valve has finally fully unveiled Steam game recordingproviding the ability to easily record and capture your gaming sessions for all to see. The recording can be set to run in the background during gaming sessions, or you can trigger it manually. It’s essentially the same core feature you’ll find in AMD Relive and Nvidia ShadowPlay, but built right into Steam.

WITH Steam continues to be the dominant platform on best gaming computersThis easy access to such a powerful recording feature means that many gamers are likely to use it. However, Steam Game Recording is missing one feature that may force some users to use alternative game recording apps for now.

What is Steam Game Recording?

Recording Steam games is a new option in the latest version of Steam. which allows you to set up automatic or manual recording of any game on Steam that supports the Steam overlay feature.

Select the manual recording option and you can use the keyboard shortcut (Crtl+F11 is the default) to start and stop recording. Meanwhile, background recording will simply force Steam to start recording every time you open a game, continuously recording a window of gameplay of a set length (120 minutes or two hours by default).

Whichever option you choose, you can also add timeline markers by pressing Ctrl+F12 and take screenshots by pressing F12. Timeline markers are indicators that appear in Steam’s built-in video navigation system that make it easier to find key moments in your recordings after finishing the game.

The new feature will also automatically add custom timeline markers based on in-game events, showing boss battles, deaths, eliminations, and more. Game developers can use the Game Recording API to have their games trigger these timeline events.

Recordings are saved in the folder you select, but are not initially saved as available video clips. Instead, you can navigate through your videos on Steam. Videos for each game appear next to the game, and by clicking on one, you can view the timeline, pull out clips, add additional markers, or simply delete a clip.

Click the Share Clip button in the video navigator and you can export the clip’s video file, copy it to the clipboard, send it to your phone or other device, or create a sharing link.

It’s an incredibly powerful and easy-to-use set of tools that makes it very easy to record and do basic editing of a clip for publishing.

Steam Game Recording Settings

Whether you choose manual or automatic recording, most of the basic game recording settings are the same. In terms of video recording options, you can change the frame rate (30 or 60 fps) and video height (essentially resolution), enable H.265 video encoding, and choose whether to use GPU video encoding. The latter option is available if you have a compatible GPU, but the software will use CPU encoding if you don’t have a compatible GPU.

In terms of audio, you can also add a microphone to the recording and record only the game audio, the entire system audio, or just the output of the game and certain applications.

Select the automatic recording option, and you can also set up duration and recording quality profiles for a specific game. The video length limit is 9999 minutes, which is 166 hours or just under a week, so there’s plenty of time to record even the longest solo sessions.

What can’t Steam Game Recording do?

While game recording is a very powerful tool, it currently cannot emulate the Highlights feature of Nvidia’s popular ShadowPlay/Overlay tool. This can provide continuous video recording functionality, but will only record clips when something interesting is happening in your game. So, if you win or win in Fortnite, it will record a five-minute window around that point. It can also take screenshots of your victory.

Game Recording can do the same thing with its timeline marker feature, but it doesn’t go as far as preparing clips that you can share. Likewise, since the game recording feature doesn’t immediately create a usable video file, you always have to go into Steam to play the video clip and then export the video clip, so it’s not that fast of a clip-sharing process, although exporting doesn’t take long.

Does recording a Steam game affect framerate?

Yes, recording games can reduce frame rates because video recording uses some CPU and GPU resources to encode the video. In Apex Legends, we saw a drop in frame rate from 160 fps with recording turned off to 146 fps with automatic background recording. This means a 9% frame rate drop when recording the game in 4K at 60fps. The impact is less at lower resolutions, but performance will be slightly reduced.

If you want game capture without any performance hit, you’ll need to use an external capture device, such as one of the models in our catalog. best capture cards guide.

How to enable Steam game recording

Steam Game Recording is part of the latest public release of Steam, so you just need to update Steam to get it. After the update, you will be able to navigate to the new Game Recording option under Settings. Here you will find three main recording options available: no recording, background recording and manual recording. Just choose which version you want to use and you’re done.

Have you tried recording games on Steam yet? If so, how did you rate its performance and what features would you like to see in it? Share your thoughts with us on PCGamesN on Facebook and PCGamesN X pages.

In the meantime, to learn more about how to get the most out of Valve’s products, check out the latest news. Games for Steam Deck Humble Bundle to get over $180 worth of games for just $11.