OBS Studio is pretty much the standard for this.

As stan pointed out, your i5 is a bit of a bottleneck since it has to share the load with both the game and recording.

To minimize the fps loss I suggest lowering the quality a bit, don't use any compression (this will minimize cpu usage but produce large files. Also if you have 2 drives, don't save the video on the same drive as the game you're recording as this will create a bit of stutter (especially if it's an HDD).

Simplescreenrecorder is not bad, it's what I use for my game recordings with very minimal frame loss. However this is possible due to high thread count and carefully dividing the load using the 'taskset' command.

OBS is also very good and is a much more featured program than SSR.

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 22 Sep 2020 at 10:38 pm UTC

ffmpeg with nvidia nvenc is very good

:smile:

You have comments rocks. Thanks. I tested some of your suggest. But currently, with OBS, the recording with vaapi don't use my GPU and only use cpu. So, I had further more and I found the soluce to record screen while gaming with AMD hardware encoding without lose FPS. I use the following command. Of course, it's not easy to start/stop recording. I will make a GUI front end soon.
ffmpeg -vaapi_device /dev/dri/renderD128 -f x11grab -video_size 1920x1080 -i :0 -vf 'hwupload,scale_vaapi=format=nv12' -c:v h264_vaapi -b:v 15M -preset superfast '/home/username/screenrecord.mp4'

Last edited by Vinouch on 23 Sep 2020 at 1:49 pm UTC

It's a little bit fiddly to get working, but you might want to use kmsgrab instead of x11grab to capture the screen. It will minimize CPU usage and framedrops as all surfaces stay on the GPU.

(Also works on Wayland and in virtual terminals!)

I prefer Kazam screen recorder. It is extremely easy to use and lightweight.

I found exactly what I need.

A small GUI to record in VAAPI:

https://github.com/Philippe734/tiny.vaapi.recorder

Quoting: VinouchI found exactly what I need.

A small GUI to record in VAAPI:

https://github.com/Philippe734/tiny.vaapi.recorder

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:smile:

Quoting: VinouchI found exactly what I need.

A small GUI to record in VAAPI:

https://github.com/Philippe734/tiny.vaapi.recorder

Nice, it's a small bash script which you can modify for your needs (like changing the codec and etc.).

https://github.com/Philippe734/tiny.vaapi.recorder/blob/main/tiny.vaapi.recorder.sh

Also, I wonder what's the method in the Wayland session where x11grab is not an option. I suppose there must be some ffmpeg / Pipewire integration for that?

Last edited by Shmerl on 5 Oct 2020 at 9:32 pm UTC

Quoting: VinouchI found exactly what I need.

A small GUI to record in VAAPI:

https://github.com/Philippe734/tiny.vaapi.recorder

Nice!

You might want to remove the preset option though. It has no effect with vaapi, it's a libx264 setting.

You might also want to experiment with using constant quality in lossless mode (if you don't mind large files) using -qp 0 instead of VBR. I seem to recall getting better results with that, but it probably varies from system to system.

Quoting: ShmerlAlso, I wonder what's the method in the Wayland session where x11grab is not an option. I suppose there must be some ffmpeg / Pipewire integration for that?

[kmsgrab](https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-devices.html#kmsgrab) as mentioned in the thread previously, skips those nasty roundtrips to the CPU.

Quoting: whizse[kmsgrab](https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-devices.html#kmsgrab) as mentioned in the thread previously, skips those nasty roundtrips to the CPU.

That doesn't sound like a good method - it requires some explicit permissions access that's not on compositor level. The proper way would be something like pipewire and access controlled by the compositor. For less trips, it can be using DMA-BUF.

Last edited by Shmerl on 5 Oct 2020 at 9:52 pm UTC

Work in progress here FWIW,
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758