NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience 1.8.1 Introduces Twitch.tv Streaming via ShadowPlay

At the start of the month, NVIDIA issued a GeForce Experience update that added adjustable optimal settings and some ShadowPlay improvements – both rather significant in their own right. Now, the company has updated the client once again to add something that’s going to make NVIDIA look very attractive to game streamers: Twitch.tv streaming via ShadowPlay.

What this feature means is that gameplay can be captured on-the-fly with ShadowPlay (with the help of GeForce GPU acceleration), without noticeable lag, and then be streamed to Twitch.tv. Because of ShadowPlay’s optimizations, the gamer doing the streaming shouldn’t spot a performance hit at all, but the performance of the stream itself should be greatly improved.

At an event a couple of months ago, I saw this feature in action, and if it works as well as the demo showed, then it will to become a boon for online game streamers. What ShadowPlay does is effectively rid out the overhead of capturing live game video, so in addition to increasing the reliability of the stream, it should also reduce some frustrations on behalf of the streamer themselves.

I consider ShadowPlay to be one of the best technologies released this year, and with Twitch.tv support now tying in with it, it manages to become even better.