Valve announced Steam Game Recording a few months ago as another alternative to using game capture software or apps from graphics vendors like AMD and Nvidia. Today, that feature is coming out of beta, with it now being available across all Steam games "for creating and sharing your gameplay footage, which runs in the background so you never miss a moment."
The built-in Steam Game Recording feature-set lets players capture their games using either background recording for quickly securing highlight clips when needed, or manually using record and stop, both via hotkeys. Even the duration and quality levels can be tweaked on a per game basis, with a "Do Not Record" option being also an option.
Using the Steam Overlay, Valve is also offering a replay option. This lets Steam users quickly rewind and scrub through their most recent recordings to see what happened earlier in their games.
Some games come with official support for timeline and event markers. Here, the recording automatically shows important events like kills, while also highlighting time spent in lobbies and menus to remove them easily from clips. For now, it"s unclear how many games outside of Valve"s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 support this Timeline-enhanced function, but an SDK and API are available for third-party developers to implement it onto their games.
Regarding what sort of performance players can expect to lose by using the recording feature, Valve said this:
Steam Game Recording has been designed with the goal of taking as little computer resources away from the game you are playing as possible. It takes advantage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to remove most of the performance cost of creating video recordings. When run on systems without those graphics cards, the systems CPU is used to create video recordings which may cause a noticeable performance impact on those systems.
For editing recorded clips, Valve has built-in tools available too, which can be found in the new Recordings and Screenshots interface on Steam.
During the stay in beta, Valve has expanded the options available for saving and sharing recorded clips. Straight from Steam, players are able to export clips as MP4 files, send it to another device (like to a PC from a Steam Deck) of the user, share it to mobile devices via a QR code, and even make a temporary link to directly view it via Steam for anyone.