How to record gameplay on a PC

The short answer

Xbox Game Bar, built into Windows

Press Windows plus G to open the overlay, then Windows plus Alt plus R to start and stop recording. Nothing to install and nothing to configure, which is the whole appeal.

The limits arrive quickly. It will not record the desktop or File Explorer, it decides for itself whether your application counts as a game, and it offers very little control over quality. For a two minute clip of something that just happened, none of that matters.

Your graphics card's own recorder

Both major manufacturers ship a recorder alongside their drivers, and both do something Game Bar does poorly: continuously buffering the last few minutes so you can save a moment after it has already passed.

On NVIDIA hardware this lives in the NVIDIA app, which replaced GeForce Experience. On AMD it is part of the Adrenalin software. In both cases the feature is usually called instant replay or something close to it, and it is the correct tool for highlights, because nobody starts recording before a good moment knowing it is coming.

The performance cost is small on modern cards, because the encoding runs on dedicated silicon rather than the part of the GPU rendering your game. On older hardware it is noticeable, and the fix is lowering the recording resolution rather than turning the feature off.

OBS Studio, when you need control

Free, records anything on screen, and gives you genuine control over resolution, frame rate, bitrate and what appears in frame. It is also the only one of the three that lets you build a layout — game, webcam, overlay — rather than capturing whatever the screen happens to show.

The cost is setup. OBS asks you to make decisions the other two make for you, and its defaults are not always the right ones for recording as opposed to streaming.

Two settings matter more than the rest. Choose a hardware encoder rather than the software one, so the recording runs on your graphics card instead of competing with the game for processor time. And record to MKV rather than MP4, because a crash mid-recording leaves an MKV playable while it leaves an MP4 corrupt.

If you record to MKV for safety, convert afterwards — most editors and platforms would rather have an MP4, and the conversion usually just repackages the file without touching the picture.

Settings that decide whether it looks good

Frame rate first. Sixty frames per second is worth it for anything with fast movement, and thirty is fine for slower games and considerably kinder to file size. Recording at a higher frame rate than the game actually achieves gains nothing.

Resolution second, and lower is often correct. Recording at 1080p while playing at 1440p costs almost nothing visually once the footage is watched on a phone or in a chat window, and it substantially reduces both file size and encoding load.

Bitrate third. Recording gives you room to be generous, since you are not constrained by an upload connection the way streaming is. Something in the range of 20 to 40 megabits per second at 1080p60 leaves plenty of headroom for editing afterwards.

Why the file is always too big

This is the part nobody warns you about. A minute of 1080p60 gameplay routinely lands between eighty and two hundred megabytes, which exceeds most chat platforms, most email servers and a good number of upload forms.

The good news is that gameplay compresses unusually well. Interface elements, static backgrounds and menus barely change between frames, and unchanging areas cost a compressor almost nothing.

Trim to the seconds that actually mattered first — this does more for size than any other single change, using the video trimmer.

For a Discord server, the presets aimed at its limits are in compress for Discord.

For TikTok, Reels or Shorts the clip also needs reshaping to vertical, which is crop video.

Recording performance, honestly

Any recorder costs something. With a hardware encoder on a card from the last few generations the cost is typically a few frames per second, which most people do not notice. With software encoding it can be severe, because the processor is then doing two demanding jobs at once.

If recording makes a game stutter, check that a hardware encoder is selected before changing anything else. That single setting accounts for most performance complaints, and it is easy to leave on the wrong option because software encoding produces slightly better quality per megabyte and is sometimes the default.

Common questions