If you’re a gamer that likes sharing your best gameplay moments with your friends or even broadcasting them to the world, then you’ve probably heard of NVIDIA ShadowPlay, arguably the best gameplay recording option for users that own a GeForce graphics card.
However, NVIDIA ShadowPlay only works on Windows. If you’re a Linux gamer, fret not, as there’s a very good alternative called GPU Screen Recorder.
Judging by its name, you might be tempted to think that this can’t possibly compete with ShadowPlay and, if that’s the case, you’d be wrong, well, sort of.
Indeed, GPU Screen Recorder doesn’t have the backing of NVIDIA (since it’s a third-party, free, and open-source tool), and it’s also true that it doesn’t look as good as NVIDIA ShadowPlay.
However, GPU Screen Recorder is designed with speed and performance in mind. In fact, it’s probably one of the fastest (if not the fastest) screen recording tools for Linux (granted your computer runs an NVIDIA GPU).
With its help, you can record your desktop for offline purposes, or live stream your activity, as well as capture those nice NVIDIA-like instant replays (where only the last few seconds are saved).
GPU Screen Recorder is a GTK frontend for the gpu-screen-recorder tool. It boasts a simple GUI with all the controls and settings neatly organized in a compact main window, and it’s pretty straightforward to use.
The real magic happens under the hood thanks to that amazing gpu-screen recorder engine. Now, this isn’t the only streaming/screen recording utility out there, but the way it works is quite efficient.
For example, it’s faster and better than OBS with nvenc, as well as OBS with the NvFBC plugin, and it’s quite different from using FFMPEG with x11grab and nvenc. While tools like OBS use the GPU for video encoding, then send the encoded window image from the GPU to the CPU and then back, the gpu-screen-recorder tool keeps the window image on the GPU and sends it directly to the video encoding unit on the GPU (using CUDA). A lot more efficient, by all accounts.
GPU Screen Recorder might not look the part, but a lot of thought and time has gone into making it what it is today, and it’s all because of the gpu-screen-recorder tool built by the same developer.
Even though it’s currently limited to NVIDIA GPUs, plans include support for AMD and Intel, the ability to capture the cursor while recording, the implementation of OpenGL injection to capture textures, and many other improvements which you can check out on the engine’s official website.
