Steam released their Game Recording (Beta) for Linux, and I wanted to see what kind of performance hit the system took compared to OBS.
Unfortunately, GPU encoding is not working with NVIDIA at the moment, so that hit is brutal. Is that going to stop me? Nope!
Recording quality
Quality settings range from 1.5 Mbps to 24 Mbps with a default of 12.
Baseline performance
For a baseline, we're going to run the Cybertruck 2077 benchmark at 1440p with high settings and DLSS set to balanced.
That gives us a baseline of 65.38 FPS average with a min of 56.16.
Steam capture
Steam capture without GPU acceleration knocked things down to an average of 49.33 FPS with a min of 43.67.
OBS Capture
OBS with GPU acceleration averaged 59.88 with a min of 51.40.
Export Format
Taking at peek at the exported *.mp4 shows us it's downscaled to 1080p using h264 with a high preset. Audio is AAC at 160 kb/s.
The key takeaway is: If you're on NVIDIA, stick with OBS for now unless your system can handle the performance hit. It's really no worse than using OBS with software encode.
Steam Game Recording JustWorks™ on the Steam Deck, so I'm guessing anyone with an AMD GPU shouldn't encounter issues enabling hardware acceleration. Give it a try.
It's a neat idea and a convenient way to make clips for those times you didn't plan on bringing OBS into the relationship.
Check out the IL Wishlist for upcoming project ideas.
Now for some hot AMD 5600G action because two hours later I remembered I had one lying around.
No recording
The 5600G managed 43 FPS at 720p.
GPU hardware recording disabled
This is neat / impressive. 40 FPS while recording.
GPU hardware recording enabled
Well now, that's a mystery of sorts. Another 40 FPS?
System load
At first, I thought GPU encode was borked on the 5600G, but having a look at htop shows that's not the case.
Welp, that raised more question than it answered ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Check out the IL Wishlist for upcoming project ideas.
