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It's a game-changer. No longer the preserve of those who invest in specialist capture equipment, the arrival of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 allows every new console owner to record and broadcast gameplay, with Nvidia joining the party with the recent release of its ShadowPlay system for PC. All of this is happening in parallel with the meteoric rise of streaming services like Twitch, which along with the continued success of YouTube offers a robust platform for anyone to transmit their gameplay to the world, whether livestreaming or simply sharing video.In this article, we'll be taking a look at the new options available to gamers in sharing their gameplay, with a focus on the facilities offered by the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. PC also gets a look-in too owing to the recent release of a seriously impressive piece of tech: Nvidia's recent ShadowPlay update allows gamers to save off high-quality 1080p60 clips while they play - an entirely free upgrade to anyone who owns one of its graphics cards based on the Kepler architecture, virtually any GTX 6xx or GTX 7xx desktop graphics card.
So let's look at the basics of how these systems work. All of them are based on the same principle: video is compressed into the h.264 format on the fly courtesy of built-in hardware encoders. This is custom silicon built for the task at hand - in the case of Xbox One and PlayStation 4, this has precisely no effect on the performance of the system, while in the case of ShadowPlay, we're looking at an estimated three to five per cent drop in the performance of the GPU - not bad at all considering the quality of the assets produced. All of these systems offer the ability to save off HD gameplay for easy sharing: Xbox One allows for distribution of video via Xbox Live or SkyDrive, while PlayStation 4 opts for Facebook. ShadowPlay simply dumps off video files onto your hard drive - with the gamer deciding from there what to do with them. Think of that as the 'power' option for advanced users.
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