What Kind of PC Hardware Is Needed to Record In-Game Videos

Do you want to record in-game video footage from one of your games and want to know exactly what kind of PC hardware you’re going to need? Maybe you’ve already tried it and found the results to be less than ideal?

Before you start thinking about the exact hardware you’ll require, there are a few things that you need to know about recording in-game videos.

Quality vs. Hardware

When you’re considering the PC hardware that you’ll need, you should be aware of the fact that better hardware is going to mean that you can record better quality videos for two reasons:

• It will allow you to record videos at higher resolutions and with higher framerates.
• It will let you run your game with higher graphic settings that makes it look better.

Because of both these factors, you will find that any improvements you make to your PC hardware will help in one way or another. More importantly it means that at the end of the day the kind of PC hardware that you need will largely depend on the quality that you expect to be able to record.

Types of PC Hardware

While your PC hardware will affect your game recording in some way or other, there are a few areas that you should focus on:

• CPU

One of the areas that is taxed the most by game recording software is the CPU because not only will it be using it to record video footage, but the game itself will be using it to run. Higher clock speeds and better architecture can make a big difference for both those reasons.

• GPU

Similar to the CPU, the GPU (i.e. graphics card) is going to be bear the load of running the game and in some cases may also share its power with the recording. As such better GPUs will enable you to run your games with better graphic settings while recording at higher quality parameters.

• RAM

Normally RAM isn’t an area you have to worry about that much when recording games, so long as you have more than enough to run the game and the game recording software at the same time. To be safe you may want to have extra RAM on top of that, but anything between 8 GB to 16 GB should more than suffice.

• Hard disk drive

When it comes to your hard disk drive you should consider several factors, and the first is the space that is available. Recording high quality videos can take up a lot of space, and so you need to make sure you always have more than enough storage space to cope with it.

Additionally recording onto hard drives and reading from it to run the games can create a potential bottleneck, which is why some experts recommend using two hard drives – one to record on, and one to run the operating system and the game itself. If you want you can use Solid State Drives (SSDs) as opposed to regular hard drives, as they have faster read/write speeds that can increase performance in general.

It is worth noting that some game recorders nowadays allow the option of encoding videos on the fly as they’re being recorded. While this may seem like a good idea as it does away with the need to encode the videos later – it will further tax your PC’s resources and require better hardware to pull off. As such you should think long and hard about whether it is really necessary.

Now that you know the areas that you should focus on the most in terms of your PC hardware, you can start to make some decisions. While it would be nice to build a dream PC with the best hardware that can record games at the highest graphics settings without any issues – your budget will play an important factor. In most cases it is all about focusing on what’s important and finding a compromise that is acceptable.