Tuesday 19 November 2013

NVIDIA ShadowPlay Recording Feature

NVIDIA have released driver version 331.65 which enables a beta version of "ShadowPlay" which is only available on the 600/700 series of NVIDIA graphics cards. ShadowPlay allows the user to record any game with very very low frame rate drops and doesn't put much load on the computers processor or hard drive, as it uses a small bit rate. ShadowPlay takes advantage of a H.264 hardware encoder on the actual graphics card and allows recordings in 1920x1080 (1080p). At the moment it's in beta stage so there isn't much customization available, there is only a set resolution and you can't add a microphone to record, you can only have game audio. There is another feature of ShadowPlay which makes it stand out, which is the shadow recording mode. This mode means that if you have ShadowPlay on, running in the background and shadow recording is on, that means that if you get something really cool in the game you are playing and you weren't recording, if you press the shadow recording key it will save a recording of however long you chose beforehand. For example you can have the shadow recording to last for 10 minutes like this,
this means that ShadowPlay will constantly be recording for up to 10 minutes and anything after that will get deleted and if you chose not save the shadow recording then there won't be any file. You can have the shadow time any length up to 20 minutes, but the longer you have it on for the bigger the file size will be. You can also set the quality of the recording which will make file sizes bigger or smaller depending on what quality you choose. 









Sources:
I use it as well.

Monday 16 September 2013

What is a Blog?


A blog is something which someone updates on a regular basis and provides the appropriate information for that blog. Each blog will be about something else, and a blog is usually about someones interests and the follewers of that blog are interested in that as well. For example a blog can be about sports and another blog may be about music. Anyone can make a blog for free and talk about anything that they like. A blog also has to be regularly updated so that the followers of that blog won't lose interest in it.

What is an RSS Reader and Why use it?


An RSS Reader is something that allows people to follow other peoples blogs and get notified through the RSS Reader on when someone updates that blog. It also means that if you want to follow a large amount of blogs, they are all in one place instead of you having to find them again. An RSS Reader also allows you to go directly to a blog.

Wednesday 4 September 2013

How a computer graphics card works.

A computers graphics card works with the processor to form the correct image, the processor gets information from the software and sends that information to the graphics card. The graphics card then has to calculate how to arrange the pixels in order to show the correct image, the graphics card then sends the correct image through a HDMI/VGA cable (or any other usable cable) and allows the person to see the image on the screen. In a game, the graphics card has to be able to produce a 3D image very quickly and well and does this by firstly putting all the information into a wireframe, then it has to fill in the remaining pixels to create the full thing and then can add lighting, colour and textures. Different graphics cards have different speeds in which they can do this, a more expensive graphics card will be able to do this process faster which will mean the game will run smoother. Also depending on what graphical settings the user uses whilst playing the game can also affect how smooth the game will run, and how much load there will be on the graphics card.




Sources: http://www.howstuffworks.com/graphics-card.htm