PC desktop record software recommendations?

Hey yo,

I'm in the market for a new program to record clips of videogames on my PC in addition to random stuff on my desktop outside of games (whether that's my full desktop or just focusing on an application).

Believe it or not, I've been using the recording function through the Xbox app. It has been overall fine, however, I would like something that has some more functionality. My main complaint with the Xbox app is how massive some of those recordings can get, but maybe that's how a lot of screen recording software is nowadays.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Do you have an NVidia card? If so, then I wouldn't bother using anything other than Shadowplay. It's hidden inside the GeForce Experience app, but it's convenient to use (you can set it up to always record the last 15+ mins of gameplay and just save it out on command) and it has an almost negligible performance hit since (as far as I understand) it takes advantage of hardware on your GPU itself, instead of being a software recorder. If you check an option you can even allow Shadowplay to record your desktop as well, but I don't think it will do auto cropping to a specific desktop app.

As for file sizes though, you can configure the bitrate to use when recording but I'd advocate to just set it as high as it will go (and to be honest, I wish it went higher because you still see compression artefacts).

OBS is good a free. I've used it to record some gameplay as well as desktop stuff and it worked well. I found it intuitive to use but, if you get stuck there are million tutorials out there as it the current "industry standard" for youtubers and twitch streamers. You can also configure quality which should help with the file size issue.

OBS is good and free