Introduction

Capturing PC gameplay often comes at the cost of performance. Depending on the software, hardware, the game and the image quality settings used, the gameplay performance hit may be 20% or more while recording. From my experience, Nvidia ShadowPlay seems to be the simplest and most efficient method for 4K gameplay capture.

I was curious to see what kind of performance drops I was getting with some of the game captures when using ShadowPlay, so I decided to run some tests. I like to test built-in benchmarks whenever possible because of their repeatability. I also enjoy testing a mix of old and new titles.
Test Setup

Test Setup

For this article, I chose 10 games spanning almost two decades and tested them on a system with an Nvidia RTX 3090, Ryzen 5600X CPU and 16GB of RAM (except for Borderlands 3 which was tested with 32 GB). Unless otherwise stated, all games were tested at 4K resolution and the highest image quality settings.

F.E.A.R (2005)

The first game in our lineup is an absolute legend among PC games. First encounter Assault Recon, or Fear. The game came out in 2005 and was a total GPU killer. It featured an amazing level of graphical fidelity. Not only that, its gameplay, story and overall attention to detail were way ahead of its time.

I have been benchmarking Fear ever since it came out and to this day, this title amazes me in how well it responds to modern hardware, especially GPUs. It gets an average FPS of 465 which drops down to 419 when recording with Shadowplay. This is a 9.7% performance loss which as we will see is an outlier. But then again Fear delivers way more FPS than any other title that we tested.

Far Cry 2 (2008)

Next up is Far Cry 2, released in 2008. Far Cry 2 is another title that was way ahead of its time and is considered by many Far Cry fans to be the best game in the series. The game featured great gunplay, hardcore survival mechanics, weapon jamming, as well as a fire propagation system which was unique at the time. The built in benchmark runs at an average FPS of 280. With Shadowplay running, the average FPS reduced by 5.4% to 265.

Resident Evil 5 (2009)

Our third title is Resident Evil 5. I never really got into any of the Resident Evil games other than for benchmarking purposes, and that too only with Resident Evil 5. This game came out in 2009 and has always been a relatively CPU heavy title.

In our benchmark run we get 279 fps average without recording. This dips down by only 8 frames to 271 which is less than a 3% drop.

Lost Planet 2 (2011)

We now move on to a couple DX11 titles, the first one being Lost Planet 2 from 2011. The original Lost Planet featured a very detailed built in benchmark with multiple scenes and varying environments. The second title is a single scene and it looks quite good even by today’s standards
It runs at 120 and 124 frames per second with and without Shadow play. The performance hit while recording is just over 3%.

Metro 2022 Redux (2014)

The second DX11 title is Metro Redux 2033 which was released in 2014. It is a remaster of the original Metro 2033 from 2010 which was a highly impressive title especially when it came to the graphics and environments.

A lot of people would compare it to Crysis which had released three years earlier. The Metro games have always been very resource intensive. This benchmark runs at only 57 frames per second with Shadowplay running in the background. The average drops down by 7% to 51 FPS.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divides (2016)

We now move on to some DX12 titles and the first one in the list is a game from 2016, Deus Mankind Divided. It is hard to believe that this game was released eight years ago. It looks absolutely gorgeous by today’s standards. It is also very taxing on the GPU.
The antialiasing was kept at 2x for the benchmark run. The average FPS without recording is 58. The performance hit with recording is around 3.5%

Borderlands 3 (2019)

The seventh title in our list is Borderlands 3 which was released in 2019. The built in benchmark can be run in DX11 or DX12 modes. For our test we used DX12. Also unlike all the other tests, this benchmark was run with 32 gigabytes of RAM instead of 16.

The average FPS are 80 and 77, less than 4% performance drop while gameplay recording.

Far Cry 6 (2021)

Let us now look at another Far Cry game. The most recent game in the series is Far Cry 6 from 2021. For some reason it gets a lot of hate from Far Cry fans. I personally feel that it is quite an underrated title. I especially like the story and the way it is told.
The game touches upon some political themes in a very relevant and authentic way. Graphically it looks quite good even without HD textures. Shadowplay results in a 6% performance drop. The average FPS drops from 82 to 77.

GRID Legends (2022)

We are going to shift gears now and look at a totally different genre. The next title in our list is Grid Legends from 2022. It is the latest game in the long running Grid series. Grid games have always had good graphics and solid driving mechanics.

They provide a good balance between arcade and simulation racing, which is why Grid is my favorite racing game series Grid Legend Looks and runs great the benchmark scene runs at an average FPS of 110 and 104. That is a 5.5% performance hit during gameplay capture.

Black Myth Wukong (2024)

For our final title we will be looking at Black Myth Wukong. Released in 2024, this is one of the most demanding PC games currently available. For the benchmark run, we set everything to cinematic quality except for shadows which were set to high and global illumination set to low.

Ray tracing was turned off. These settings are optimized for a good balance between image quality and performance. The average FPS were 51 and 48. That is almost a 6% performance loss due to Shadowplay.

Summary of Results

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say that when using Shadowplay to record gameplay, one can expect an average performance drop of around 5%, with most titles falling in the 3 to 6% range, at least on a system with similar specs to the one tested. Depending on the hardware used and the game tested, there may be some cases where the drop would fall outside the 3 to 6% range, but in the vast majority of practical scenarios the performance loss should be less than 10%.