Game Recording feature

[thetargos]

Hi all.

I recently started playing with the game recording tool in Steam Client for Linux, after using it somehwat extensively on my Steam Deck, but in the Linux client I have stumbled into some issues, but I wanted to first know if these are issues generally present or if they are local to my system somehow.

First off, on my main rig I run an nVidia graphics card, big difference in regards to the Stem Deck, and secondly I changed the location of the recordings due to storage contraints and limitations of my main /home partition and drive.

But I ran into issues: Basically when I start a game, I see there is increased CPU usage (to be expected when coding the video signal) and upon exiting the game, indeed there seems to be a recording of the session, but the problem is that I do not seem to be able to play it back. In the timeline the first part of the recording is grayed out and text on the screen in regards that the footage can't be located, There is another part where if I hover my mouse over, I can indeed see frames of the recording, but pressing play causes the head to go back to the beginning and not playback anything.

I changed video drivers (to the latest beta nvidia driver available in my distro) in the hopes that maybe this could be the issue, to no avail. However, the impact of the recording on the gameplay framerate seems to have been corrected. For instance a game such as Lies of P would have its framerate more than halved by having the recording on, upon driver update, the impact is negligible. I can still see frames of footage being captured, but the start of the recording is grayed out. This happens regardless of the game and regardless of the resolution I set the game to run at.

I switched from the stable to the beta client, same issue, and changed from a Wayland Session to X11, same issue (only in pure X11 the BPM framerate crawls to a stop as well as the Steam Overlay).

Of course OBS works really well, but again, I wanted to use built in tool.

My hardware:
CPU: AMD Ryzen R9 9950X3D
RAM: 64 GiB DDR5 6000MTS
GPU: nVidia 5080

OS: Fedora 42

I hope Valve does take the time to fix this tool, as it is indeed awesome in the Deck, and while I agree, that maybe it works wonders with AMD hardware, I hope at least someone could chime in and state their experience with AMD cards and OS combination that are not the Steam Deck. I for example wonder how does it work on SteamOS running on non Steam hardware, like the Legon Go S or the ROG Ally X, etc.

[[GNU] Debian ☭]

Cant help us because I don't own nvidia GPUs anymore, and with amd's, it works flawlessly; just disable h.265
You have the same CPU and ram amounts as my PC tho; I set background replay to 20 minutes, and it runs flawlessly. Guess it is really GPU related/drivers/APIs...

[thetargos]

That was my guess...

I will perform a few more tests.

It is indeed surprisign that h265 would have issues, but makes sense in that it is a less mature codec than h264, at least when it comes to general availability.

Will test with h264 and h265 and report back... Maybe I should power cycle the machine as well, just to make sure.

[thetargos]

Well it works... kinda...

TL;DR seems to be problems with nvidia's HW encoder.

I reset everything to the absolute basics, and it would seem that there is no support for nvidia's HW encoder (nvenc).

I was able to export a clip successfully by disabling HW encode, alas, the the recording exhibits the same behavior, it does not play and shows the beginning as grayed out with the text "Recording not Available".

I also noticed that if the game plays at high framerate (higher than 60 FPS), there are areas that seem to stutter in the exported clip (to be expected if there were variations in framerate), but these are quite noticeable in the recording.

Thus far I tested NO HW encoding, dropping to h264 codec and left the framerate at 60 FPS, with medium and high quality, running on X11. Wayland should work, but that will be my next attempt, though I have first to set back my video drivers as the nvidia 580 beta drivers seem to have issues with some applications (or rather mutter) in Wayland, and it can out my whole session (I run GNOME).

Since the issue seems to stem from nvidia support (and we know how it is), I am uncertain where to report this? Do I file a bug report on GitHub for Valve? or should I open a report with nvidia? (though I do not know if they even have such a thing for mortal users).

For the time being, though, I think I'll stick to OBS, just have to figure out the quality settings. Steam's exported clips have objectively MUCH better quality than what I have been able to grab with OBS (h264, h265 and even AV1 with High preset, slow encoding speed, two pass, and high bitrate [>10KBPS], with and without nvenc)... it was actually due to this, that wanted to delve into Steam's Game Recording in the first place, and that for some reason the recordings are too dark. I did not notice the frame pacing issues, though even when playing at 100+ FPS and encoding at 60 FPS.