How to clip the last few minutes of gameplay on Windows, on any GPU

The feature you want is a replay buffer

Almost everyone starts by looking for a recorder, presses record before a session, and ends up with a 40GB file they never open. That is backwards, and it is not what the people posting clips are doing.

What they use is a replay buffer: the software is always encoding, but it only ever keeps the last few minutes, throwing away everything older. Nothing reaches your drive permanently until you press a key, at which point the few minutes still in memory are written out. You are not starting a recording when you press the key. You are stopping one from being discarded.

This is why the feature has confusing names. NVIDIA calls it Instant Replay, AMD has called it both Instant Replay and ReLive, Windows calls it "Record the last 30 seconds", and OBS calls it the Replay Buffer. They are the same idea.

What it costs you, and why that varies so much

"Does it hurt my FPS" has a real answer, and it depends on two decisions the software makes on your behalf.

Where the encoding happens

Every modern GPU has a dedicated video encoder built into the silicon — NVENC on NVIDIA, and equivalents on AMD and Intel. It sits separate from the shader cores that render your game, so using it costs almost nothing you were using anyway. Encoding on the CPU instead, with something like x264, is where the stutter stories come from. Any tool worth using defaults to the hardware encoder.

How frames are captured

This one is less discussed and matters more than people expect. Grabbing the whole screen through the Desktop Duplication API is close to free, because the compositor is already producing that image. Grabbing one specific window through the older GDI path makes the system draw it again on request.

The gap is not subtle. Measuring the same workload both ways, window capture consumed 70.6 CPU-seconds against 6.0 for Desktop Duplication — roughly twelve times the cost for the same footage. If a recorder offers to capture "just the game window" and your frame rate drops when you enable it, this is usually why.

The options

Checked in August 2026. Vendors change these often, so treat the specifics as a starting point rather than gospel.

If you have an NVIDIA card

Use Instant Replay. It is free, it is already installed, it costs very little, and it adds nothing to your clips. There is no argument for installing anything else unless you specifically need something it does not do. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

If you have AMD or Intel

This is where it gets thinner, and it is the single most common reason people go looking. AMD's equivalent exists and is free, but it has a longer history of being switched off by driver updates or silently failing to capture particular games. Intel's provision depends heavily on which graphics you have. Both are worth trying first, because free and built-in beats everything else when it works.

When it does not work, the honest options are a vendor-neutral tool: OBS, something commercial, or Radium.

If you already run OBS

Turn on the Replay Buffer in Settings and bind a hotkey. It is genuinely good and you already have it. The catch is that OBS is a broadcasting suite you are using one feature of: it wants a scene collection configured, it does not know what game you were playing, and it will not help you trim the clip afterwards. That is a fair trade for some people and an irritation for others.

The part nobody mentions until later

Saving the clip is the easy half. What follows is where tools differ more than their feature lists suggest.

Trimming. A twenty minute buffer is not a clip. If your recorder dumps the whole buffer and leaves you to open a video editor, most of those clips never get shared. If it only ever saves the last 30 seconds, you will regularly miss the setup that made the moment funny. Saving generously and cutting down afterwards, in the same application, is the workflow that survives contact with actually using it.

What is in the frame. Tools that follow a single window record whatever you alt-tabbed to. Tools that capture the screen always have the game in them, and the remaining question is only whether the clip gets labelled correctly. Attributing a clip to the game that was on screen, rather than to the app that happened to be focused, is a small thing that becomes obvious once you have two hundred clips.

Where the file ends up. Some tools are recorders that happen to offer sharing; others are platforms that happen to record. Neither is wrong, but they are different products, and it is worth knowing which you installed. If clips land on someone's service by default, that is the deal you accepted, and it usually comes with an account, an upload, and a decision about your footage that is no longer entirely yours.

How to choose in about a minute

• NVIDIA GPU, no strong feelings: Instant Replay. Stop reading.
• Want zero installs: Xbox Game Bar, already on your machine.
• Already stream: OBS Replay Buffer.
• AMD or Intel and the built-in one is misbehaving: a vendor-neutral tool.
• Want long buffers, trimming, and clips that stay yours: that is the gap Radium was built for.

Who wrote this

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