You Won’t Believe What Causes ShadowPlay To Break! 

Oh my fucking god!! THANK YOU FOR FIGURING OUT THE ISSUE!!! I have had these issues for around 2 months now and you just helped me finally fix them. THANK YOU!!!!

Could you do a comparison of all known capture software? framedrops/extra latency, idk :p

It takes days of investigation and hard work to figure out this problem and there are people in the comments yelling at the editor saying that the title is clickbait this is not worth 6 mins of their time. As a video consumer you just want things to "fit ur taste perfectly". For one, this is a very detailed video where the creater demonstrated the entire debugging process and think process which eventually led to the solution of a "hard to find" bug. I think this is awesome. If it were you you might have just changed ur software and got it over with, or simply cursed all the way and punched a hole in your monitor. You probably don't have 83K subs and probably never made a quality video yourself. It is so easy to complain about something and I feel sorry if you can't appreciate the quality of the videos this channel produces.

Nice buzzfeed title

Hello from the GeForce Experience Team! Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention and for putting in so much work troubleshooting it and narrowing down the root cause. Just wanted to let you know that this video and information has been forwarded to the ShadowPlay team and will be added to the list of issues to be fixed in future releases! Also don't hesitate to drop us a line directly in the GeForce forums at forums.geforce.com/ if you find anything that isn't working the way it should, and we'll be happy to look into it. Keep gaming on!

Guys this is not clickbait, stop calling it clickbait, it a fun title but it 100% what is in the title is the content of the video, there is no bait and switch.

is there a way to restore my corrupted recordings because i made an important video and it was all messed up becasue i plugged out then in my 2nd monitor half way through and i really need the video

Love the homage to Buzzfeed in the title, except your videos actually have content. Keep it up!

Thanks, dude! I've been getting straight up corrupted videos, where they are just multiple colors of lines, and I'm going to try this out to see if it works.

Oh man... Ich kenne mich mit diesem Problemen aus! gutes Video Chris

Why would anyone down-vote this video? Usually i can kinda understand why a video has down-votes, even if I like it, but this is just a random dude trying to help other random dudes.

Who would've thought I would run into a random video from my yt feed and find the exact problem I was encountering without having a single clue about what it actually is? You've just earned a sub Mr. Chris :D

Your dedication to sound scientific analysis is inspiring.

You legend! btw his doesn't occur only on multi-monitor configurations, I had this issue on my 1 monitor setup and I changed the display port slot and it fixed it.

Fantastic troubleshooting my man! I Love this video! I'll be sure to direct any friends to this video if I hear them having similar problems.

OBS can do what shadowplay does. Just look the options, configure the buffer, and setup key shortcuts for both starting the buffer and saving it. Start the buffer when you start playing, and save when you make a great play.

I cant tell you how many videos I have seen to fix my shadowplay. YOU SAVED ME!

Omg, I thought I was going crazy. GTX960 had the very same issue for me, thanks for providing a solution!

the fix that worked for me was changing the resolution from "in-game" to "1080p" since then i am able to record in desktop capture or game capture mode just fine :) but thanks for the video really informative

Had the same strange issue right now. Fixed it and now it works fine. Thanks again m8 ! Keep up the great work.

Wow! This actually helped me. My Shadowplay has been broken on and off, mostly all the time and I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't the connectors, but an ASUS Bluetooth USB dongle. Go figure! Thx man!

Battle(Non)Sense: "Introducing OBS Studio"... You're welcome! :D

You deserve way more subs my friend. Well done, Awesome find.

I have another problem when connecting a 2nd monitor. If I turn all the windows and my cursor is on the desktop - the load on the GPU increases and the computer starts to slow down strongly (even the mouse moves with a strong delay). I'll try another port for the 2nd monitor, maybe your method will work here, thanks.

Does clickbait break it?

I love you I have had this issue for months and I never found anyone with the same issue I asked all my friends you are a god thank you so much

I have weird issues with Shadowplay too, but not these ones you mentioned. Sometimes the audio recorded is very low or even non existent. And the recorded file is corrupted with glitches all over. It has become a lottery for me really, I record and hope it doesn't mess up. (I have only one DP monitor hooked)

Thanks Chris! Awesome video!

omg this was it. this was actually it! I've been looking for a solution to this for weeks. THANKS MAN!

I love you ! I had problems with shadow play for 3 months, I tried everything. It was not a framerate problem, shadow play would just record a black screen. Just offseting my display ports by one port solved the problem :)

I almost lost hope to solve this problem, i haven't recorded a single video in the last month because of black screen comes in my recordings. Honestly I watched the video and was optimistic to work for me. But boom it worked cris. Thanks very very much

Apparently the audio/video sync issue in ShadowPlay output also happens where there's ONLY ONE monitor connected with DVI-D port. 20+ minutes ShadowPlay outputs play perfectly fine when clicked on them directly even when seeked toward the end of those outputs. Looking at their properties... they are perfectly fine too! It says 60.00 frames/second in Details tab, but can you let me finish this off by clicking Read More? My stringent video quality and deadline requirements mean that my video editings of gameplay are on unusual side. It only happens when I hook them up on just ANY video editing software, including but not limited to Adobe Premiere Pro, Avisynth, FFmpeg, ... As soon as I seeked the rendered outputs toward the end, the audio GRADUALLY DESYNCS with video. I use Avisynth to trim and merge videos into one output. Just to be sure no desync occurs I use AssumeFPS(60, false). As there was ABSOLUTELY NO SOLUTION to make the output in sync again without actually degrading it (lossy), I resorted to use a lossless codec (brain-dead) solution to make it in sync even when hooked up to any video editing software, not just FFmpeg (I only use this command line where audio/video sync is needed): ffmpeg -i [input].avs -vf "fps=60" -c:v utvideo -pix_fmt yuv444p -pred median -copyts -r 60 -async 60 -c:a pcm_s24le -ar 192000 [output].mkv Then I can go ahead and render the fixed lossless output normally: ffmpeg -i [output].mkv -r 60 -vf "fps=60,colormatrix=bt601:bt709,scale=3840:2160" -sws_flags experimental -threads 8 -c:v hevc_nvenc -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset slow -profile:v 4 -tier 1 -level 186 -init_qpI 14 -init_qpB 14 -init_qpP 14 -qp 1 -rc constqp -rc-lookahead 600 -2pass auto [rendered].mkv Since ShadowPlay outputs produce shifted Rec.601 colours, I had to convert them to Rec.709 to restore the lost colours back (so greens won't look too olive for example). Options about framerate remained just to be extra sure that I can guarantee no desyncs can be expected in rendered output.

Number 3 will blow my mind? Happy i never had those issues, Then again i only have 1 screen :p

Thank you, this fixed my issues with Black screen flickering with my single 4K monitor plugged into the closest DP to main board on 1070 mini

Thank you so much for this video, this issue was driving me crazy and I would have never thought to switch my cables round.

More Common Shadowplay fixes: Recordings glitched after updating drivers > Always turn Instant Replay off and then on again after updating drivers Audio from mic in only one ear > Shadowplay, and many more programs, don't like pro audio gear. Download and configure Voicemeeter and check the mono button Other strange issues > Turn off Windows 10 Game Bar and Game Bar recording feature

Switched from shadowplay to OBS(with NVENC) because nvidia's garbage experience would mess with my custom resolutions and doesnt like dual screens.

Great find man! Wonder if this will solve the issue for me too. Only with mine, it refuses to replay the replay at all and tells me it cannot play the recording at this time. Worth a shot I suppose. Great work man!

Please give this a thumbs up, I want him to see it! I'm curious if this is just an issue with the 10 Series gpu's. I have a 970, two monitors, and desktop recording enabled and I have none of these issues. Also maybe something to do with CPU? I have a 7700k, what gen is yours? It could have an effect, as I know there is a few shady thing that they have been doing on Intel's platform, like not letting older gentleman CPUs use certain features when the obviously could, just to try and get people to buy new cpu's

Please, NEVER change the ending song

Love your channel it's very informative

i literally just found this video so useful, i had to change what slot my main monitor was connected too.. oh my god.. a life saver.

What's up with the clickbait title ?

Awesome Video ! I Will spread the word!!!

The best youtuber returns with another video I didnt know I needed

Well! That explains why Shadowplay didn't work while I had 2 monitors ON.

Do people really unironically give a fuck about a title? I don't give a shit what titles or thumbnails you use, the content is what I care about, and on that front you deliver.

Guessing the alternative is OBS with an NVENC plugin. I've been using it VCE for my AMD card since ReLive is terrible, and it's fantastic - or was, until I started getting framerate issues as well. Got none of the other symptoms (or a second monitor), but well, nothing to lose in trying to switch ports.

I was have this issus like your background photo .. It fixed by it self .. Thank you man.

Thank you! this has been driving me crazy, I too have my monitor in the wrong port apparently.. Whenever I was going to record I had to restart my PC and disconnect my 2nd monitor to fix the issue but that was a pain in the ass, now I won't have to do that anymore.

Thank you for sharing this information. Love your video

Oh man my shadowplay corrupts about 70% of all my clips. I cant wait to try this! Ty I use 2 waterblocked nvidia founders editions

I notice you are getting high FPS in BF1, what video settings are you using? Very helpful video, thanks!

Very helpful video. I'm sure it must have been a a tremendous pain to troubleshoot all of that though. For some reason Nvidia always gives me issues when I use multiple monitors. For months Gsync wouldn't work on my multiple monitor setup, but it worked fine for me with Freesync. ReLive also never gave me problems and I think it has also improved to the point where it eclipses shadowplay by a bit.

I am looking forward to the OBS video :D

I have had two distinct issues with Shadowplay for a few months now that I never had previous: -After a certain amount of time that my computer is on, the process for Shadowplay just stops and nothing can fix it other than a restart -Videos recorded will work just fine... up until a certain point in the recording where the video freezes and it only records audio. Sometimes this will just be the last 30 seconds of the video, sometimes the last couple minutes. 3 monitor setup here, well one for gaming, a vertical one for various things, and a TV. My vertical display is the one in displayport, so perhaps I'll do some testing, but I am curious as to what you use for replacement recording software, especially if it has a replay-like feature. The most frustrating part is just as you said, this used to work just fine with the same setup.

This is a well done investigation, I hope you also send in a review or feedback to the relevant nVidia team so they can fix it. Great job.

Wow, thanks for that. I am about to receive a new monitor next week and i plan on using Shadowplay with it etc. I've had other problems with shadowplay in the past, related to the sound. Specifically if your windows mic setting was set on a different quality than your headphones/speakers settings, then the whole video would have simillar artifacts with stutters etc. like the ones you mentioned. Either way thanks. P.S. I have a 1080p 60fps IPS Dell monitor. Just got me an Acer Predator 1080p 144hz Gsync TN monitor. Do you reckon if i'll stumble upon any issues seeing how they are monitors from different manufacturers/ different refresh rates, different panel technology and one of em is a simple monitor, while the other has GSync available? I was reading up on Gsync on Some Motion Blur Website that was redirected there from TestUFo and i saw your channel mentioned on your input lag analysis videos.

Can confirm i also had that issue. Gonna observe if it'll be fixed. I thought it's broken for me since i use 3x 1440p displays.. Nvidia, pls..

My shadowplay has messed up for quite some time now. I'll definitely try this when I get home. Although, it didn't do like you have, but sometime video didn't record all the way. The video would play up until to certain and then freeze or it records the whole but there's no sound at all.

Any ideas why video and audio might be out of sync with shadowplay? It can be perfectly fine in the first 1-5min and then become out of sync for the rest of the video.

I experienced this on a multi monitor setup, I'll have to try this fix. Great videob

Thanks for the video. I think it will helps a lot

I use OBS for recording. Missing the "hit a button to record the last x Minutes" but otherwise super flexible and can use the nvidia codec as well. Maybe the mentioned feature can even be added via a plugin or something. I dont know that, since i dont need it.

Ahh, this has been driving me crazy for the past few months. Thanks for the tip, man.

This happens to me when I stream via shadowplay, but not when recording. Not a big deal since I use OBS anyway, but thanks for the fix!

Funny enough I had the same issue you mentioned at the end of the video. Sooner or later i found out that turning off desktop recording fixes it, and any other weird issues i had like you. Figured it might have been that my 2nd monitor was using sub 1080p + 16:10 unlike my main monitor (1080p). I suppose it was a mix out of both then, wrong port and desktop recording was activated, huh.

I had also a Problem that Shadowplay recorded with the Resolution from my second Monitor. And i had also often the Problem, that Shadowplay sometimes didn't recorded Sound. I fixed it with connecting my second screen to the i-GPU.

The desync and framerate issues started 10 days ago and corrupted 20-30 hours of footage. Spend hours on Saturday trying everything. I will try this tomorrow and hope it works!

Only issues I have currently seem to be with the speed of my clips. Sometimes my clips will have spots where they are sped up for a brief second here and there, throwing audio out of sync. Also have issues of the audio being out of sync sometimes, when imported into sony vegas. I can adjust it, unless its the first problem.

Love you dude. I had the same Problem with my zotac card

The flickering issue can be fixed by enabling " privacy mode" wich blocks your desktop from being captured.

Very innovative content as always!

This worked for me! Thank you!!!

I and my friend get a lot of issues such as no audio , corrupted pixelated video , out of sync or cannot record last 15mins at all Shadowplay has too many years now and still has issues

Nice video Chris!! I used to use Nvidia ShadowPlay for my records but lately I've been having a lot of FPS drops issues, IO honestly don't know if it is ShadowPlay itself or my Graphics Card is getting old, I play PUBG with a GTX 950 (I'm a poor guy) and no matter how low I put the setting I always get massive FPS drops when I engage fights, the only time time that run smoothly is when I starts my computer after it's been turned off all night, but after a couple of matches I start to get the same issue again, Is it the game or my PC??

I got a pretty weird glitch where instead of capturing my csgo clip, it made a video with the audio I wanted and the pause menu from forza horizon 3 which I played yesterday. I recorded the clip AFTER I restarted my pc which was after I played Forza horizon 3. The resolution i play FH3 at is 1920x1080 and I play csgo at 1280x1024 (stretched 4:3). The video was clipped in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio with no stretching (as to be expected) but with the pause screen of the game I played at 1080p the day before. A fix for me is to always use the ALT+Z shortcut when I start my game because if I dont, its like the overlay isnt started and will either record something corrupted or something that happened right after i pressed alt+z

Lucky, for a few weeks what I had problems with was getting ShadowPlay to work at all. I could get the GUI to come up, but as soon as I tried enabling the "in-game overlay" option, it would show a loading circle until I would force close nvidia processes to start up GFE again. Essentially, I couldn't record anything. I used OBS for a while, but the last Nvidia update finally fixed that issue, so I'm back to using ShadowPlay.

I got some nice fortnite clips and i use the highlight & instant replay future, when i opened the video's they were really laggy and buggy and froze alot, do you know why and how to fix?

Probably talking about OBS/OBS Studio, looking forward to that then.

Great video, do you know if shadowplay ad any inputlag?

My problem with shadowplay was shockingly similar (heck it may even be the same problem) the only difference being that my framerates were stable in the recording. But my mic audio would just be a really LOUD screeching sound. Even though at the time of the recording i was talking to people in game and teamspeak and no one complained about my mic. So i knew the mic wasnt at fault. The mic issue was also only affecting the shadow feature (record the last x amount of minutes). The black screen and still shots of desktop was still present in both normal recording and shadow. My issue was the new "record separate audio tracks for ingame and mic" setting. I'm usually really good at remembering what settings i may have changed before an issue pops up but it took me literally weeks before i noticed the videos were corrupt. All I did was turn this feature back to "record a single audio track" and everything fixed its self. Audio and Video issues. Your issue and mine could have similar root causes heck your fix may even allow me to turn back on the "seperate audio track" feature. Ill give it a shot later and update.

I really want to see the shadow play alternative! Keep up the good work sir !

same problem, altough i have my monitors connected via dvi, but the privacy setting helps alot

"What causes shadow play to break" Everything. Litteraly fucking everything.

I think I have a similar setup to yours, 2 screens one is g-sync and a 1080ti, win10 and same games. ;) I checked where I put in my main monitor and it's in that closest to the pcie port slot you mentioned. I do not have those issues. My g-sync is obviously with DP connected and the other one is via HDMI. Just FYI

FYI if you are playing in windowed mode and disable desktop capture you wont cap videos anymore.

It's been 6 years and I had IDENTICAL issues. Turns out it was G-Sync after the latest driver update.

Thanks for the great video at least now I know what the problem with my shadowplay is and why it's not working correctly. Sadly, I can't fix it like you because my GTX 970 only has 1 Display Port output and, my 1440P 144Hz monitor needs it. The only Difference with my Shadowplay was that I also had Frame stuttering.

Do you ever do the fancy Netcode analysis for consoles? I'd love to see that.

i will try your suggestion. my shadowplay sometimes ruins my framerate in quake champions. some games it works, other game ( no hardware changes) fps count colapses and becomes very stutery and also have the 1-frame flickering issue. i also have a multi monitor setup. i'll try and test if i have the same issue, thanks so much for this video!

Just got the problem with these blackframes with my 3060 tyed everything except switching my monitors. Thanky you soo mach for doing this video freaking 4 years ago, seatched the whole internoet noe one semms to have thie problem tho thx

Thanks a lot!!! This issue was driving me crazy, as my editor software translate those missing frames to errors and I can't even use the clips :(

Btw have you tried to use monitors with different screen resolutions? I actually have had occasional issue with desktop recording being recorded in wrong resolution. ShadowPlay used secondary monitor resolution (1280x1024) instead of primary one (1920x1080). Issue is floating, and I'm not sure what causing it (probably what monitor active program was on when recording starts).

What is your render settings?

I haven't used shadowplay before but I have heard good things from it for live streaming to the internet.. very interesting issue and I hope they will, if they can, fix this issue in an update of some sort :)).. much love, brother and take care :))black_heart*..

I doubt, that the alternative software is able to use Nvidia NVFBC and NVIFR for the very fast and effective API access (which is the best feature of Shadowplay). NVENC in OBS is just using the Nvidia chip for encoding, it can not make use of the very fast way to access the frames like NVFBC or NVIFR. It seems, that Nvidia hast locked for other tools.

Yup, two monitors also screwed up my shadow play, it got worse when I switched to 4k and 1080p at the same time. Aorus 1080ti here

The work you do for gamers and devepolper is amazing, if I had some spare money, i'd help you on Patreon, amazing job man, thx.

2:26 so am I the only one who heard it? Okay I’ll leave it at that