If you’ve used a selection of different game recorders in the past, you may have noticed that there are a multiple different ways that they can capture your gaming exploits. Some recorders just use one of them, while others will let you select from a few.
No Frills Recording
At the most basic level, they may just have a screen capture mode that simply captures whatever is displayed on the screen. For ease of use and reliability, this is great because it just works.
But this comes at the cost of the peak performance that it can achieve – while good, it may not be great for the latest triple A releases that are sucking up every last resource that your PC has. When every frame can count, that is not ideal.
As an extension of screen capture mode, region capture mode doesn’t really do anything different except all a pre-selected region of the screen is recorded instead of the whole thing.
And window capture mode also works in much the same way but just captures from a specific window instead ofthe fullscreen or a region. Sometimes the window can be selected by simply clicking on it and a frame will snap to the outside edge of the window. Other times the window needs to be selected from a list of all of the applications that are currently running and then Windows works out what part of the screen to capture.
While the capture modes mentioned so far are very easy to use, for maximum performance, more sophisticated methods of capturing are required.
High Performance Recording
How exactly game capture modes work can vary from game recorder to game recorder but the general idea is that they are able to capture directly from the game’s processes by injecting themselves into these processes. In other words, they capture the image at its very source instead of waiting for it to be passed through a series of other process until it finally reaches the screen. This ensures that the record is able to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the game and the saved videos should look great.
However, this is far more complicated to get right than screen recording because the recorder has to know exactly what processes it is supposed to capturing from.
Some recorders require you to launch the game that you want to record and then select it from a list of applications that it sees are running, much like how window capture mode works for some recorders. While this tends to be fairly reliable, its a bit of a hassle, especially if you like to record a variety of different games. and need to keep changing your settings.
So, to save you some bother, other game recorders watch for gaming process that are running (typically ones that involve a graphics API such as DirectX) and when they identify that one of those is the active window an overlay or HUD of some sort will be available to allow you to record to your hearts content.
But automatically detecting the game like this isn’t perfect. Support will usually be limited to games that are using specific versions of DirectX (usually 9 and newer), OpenGL or Vulkan. And sometimes games that are using these technologies still may not be detected. Or occasionally the game recorder may even detect a non-game app that is using similar process to games (for FBX we try to keep this to a minimum by telling FBX to ignore apps that we know can be incorrectly detected).
What does FBX do?
Since automatically detecting games and then recording directly from them is generally a pretty great way to go about recording games because it not only provides the best performance possible but is also easy to setup, it should come as no surprise that that is exactly what FBX does.
It really is that simple. Just launch your game while FBX is running and when the overlay appears, hit the record hotkey to start capturing the action.
That being said, game capture mode is not always the answer. And with that in mind, we’re hard at work adding a screen capture mode to FBX as an alternative way to record. Armed with both of these capture modes, there should be nothing that you can’t record!