Valve has announced that Steam’s game recording feature is out of beta and now available to everyone on Mac, PC, and Steam Deck. It also provides native tools for recording game sessions and basic editing tools for trimming clips. Users can run it in the background or start or stop recording manually. Additionally, there is a playback option that allows you to quickly review recent recordings. You can then add markers at important moments. If your game supports the timeline feature for game recordings, Steam will add its own markers.
This new feature eliminates the need for third-party recorders and apps from NVIDIA and AMD. Since the tool was first announced in June 2024, several games have offered official support for timelines and event markers, most notably Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. Third-party developers can also implement functionality using Valve’s SDK.
According to Valve, this feature minimizes resource usage unless your system has a GPU.
Steam Game Recording is designed with the goal of consuming as little computer resources as possible from the games you are playing. Utilizes NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to eliminate much of the performance cost of creating video recordings. When running on systems without these graphics cards, the system’s CPU is used to create the video recording, which can have a noticeable impact on performance.
Clips can be exported as MP4 files, sent to other devices, shared to mobile via QR code, or shared via a temporary link on Steam that anyone can view. Steam must be updated to take advantage of new features. Next, go to the “Game Recording” section of the settings and turn on the feature. Please note that it is available for Windows 10/11 and MacOS 10.13 or 10.14.
