What recording software is safe with OW?

General Discussion
1

So i’ve got to the point now where I really want to improve my gameplay and teamwork and start recording my matches and playing them back to myself.

I also want to use this as an opportunity to create a roadmap of my improvements over time.

The only thing that is really stopping me Is I don’t want my recording software to permaban me from OW for “cheating” using “3rd party apps”.

My currenly installed apps for recording are

XSplit
Action - Gameplay Recording and Streaming ( On Steam )
Fraps ( Do people even still use this? )
PlayClaw ( On Steam )

My current rig

i7 9700K ( 4.5GHz ) ( Water Cooled )
2x MSi Gaming X 8G GTX 1080’s ( HB SLi )
16GB DDR4 RAM ( 2,133 )
Recording resolution ( 1920 x 1080 )

I may possibly record at 1440p at some point down the line but I can’t see the point right now unless I Downscale 1440p to 1080p to sharpen the recording.

Will any of these ban me from OW for using them?

2

Recording software is safe as it does not extrapolate information from the game (unlike old analysis software like Pursuit or Visor did).

3 Likes
3

You’re not going to get banned for screen recording, although some recording software may have compatibility issues with Overwatch’s render pipeline.

Common usually-working ones that come to mind are:

  • NVIDIA Shadowplay (included with GeForce Experience)
  • OBS
  • Xsplit
  • Game Bar (included with Windows 10)
4 Likes
4

I personally use Shadowplay with no hindrance with performance whatsoever.

2 Likes
5

If I have two gpu’s can I disable SLi and use the second gpu purely for the rendering / recording on any apps?

6

If your recording program supports that, then I suppose you can, in theory. I don’t think you’d actually gain any kind of performance benefit by doing it that way, though, as the recording software should be optimized for streaming data straight out of the render buffer(s) anyway. I would guess that you’re better off letting the software handle that automatically, rather than dual-rendering on the individual GPUs.

Then again, I’m mostly familiar with Shadowplay, which I generally trust to interface with any NVIDIA GPU setup as efficiently as possible (because it’s their own software), so maybe the above wouldn’t apply for others.

7

OBS is free and works pretty well

8

I’m using Shadowplay, it’s worked perfectly fine ever since I’ve been using it.

I believe you automatically have it if you’ve got a Nvidia graphics card.