Clip that, clip that, clip that
Steam has just released its new game recording feature, which automatically saves your footage in the background while you play.
Have you ever had an incredible moment in a game and wished you’d been recording so you could show it to your friends, upload it to the internet, or just save it for posterity? Well now you can, easier than ever before. Back in June, Steam launched its game recording beta, and now it’s fully released and available for you to try out. No capture card necessary.
It works by saving your gameplay footage directly to your hard drive. You don’t have to manually press record so you’ll never forget – although there are options to do that as well if you like. You can then edit clips and share them directly from the redesigned Recordings & Screenshots interface. Now you can prove to your friends that you actually got that trickshot you were bragging about.
If you’re worried about this tanking your performance, you’ll be fine as long as you’re using an AMD or Nvidia graphics card. Steam will use these GPUs to keep the load off of your CPU, but if you don’t have one then you’re out of luck I’m afraid and may run into some issues.
Luckily, you can tweak the settings of the recording quite a lot. You can choose which games get recorded and for how long, and Steam will even tell you how much hard drive space this will use up. You can also turn the setting off entirely if you’d rather not sacrifice your performance or would rather use your own recording set up.
The feature works on Steam Deck and desktop and is compatible with any game that allows the Steam overlay to run on top of it – even non-Steam games.
If you’ve ever had a PS4 or PS5 then you’ll be familiar with how background recording works. I think the interface, editing, and sharing looks more intuitive on Steam’s version, though, as it also has markers that will note when you got an achievement or if you were in an actual match or just waiting in a lobby. Some games will even place markers when you complete certain actions like getting kills in multiplayer
