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I have a home built computer with an ASRock Z68-Pro3-M motherboard and an Intel Core i5. It's a good computer and does what I need. However, I'm sometimes in the need of doing screen recordings and with Windows 10's Xbox Game Bar it says it cannot record due to insufficient hardware. I'd like to upgrade the system by adding a graphics card.

My monitors are HDMI and DVI, and maybe some day I'll add a third monitor, so that capability would be nice. There is an available PCI 2.0x16 slot (blue) on my board that I'm thinking is the best option to use.

Can anyone recommend something that will work for this? I've read that I need to find one that supports Intel Quick Sync H.264, NVidia NVENC or AMD VCE, but I'm not entirely sure if that means I have to have one from one of those manufacturers or if I can get something like a cheap MSI card that costs a bit less.

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  • That's a PCIe 2.0x16 slot - a very important distinction before you end up buying a PCI graphics card.
    – towe
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 7:36

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Intel Quick Sync is only available from Intel's integrated graphics. If you're using integrated graphics you probably already have this feature. Make sure you have the latest drivers installed for your motherboard and integrated graphics. Your motherboard supports something called "Lucid Virtu" which allows a dedicated graphics card and integrated Intel graphics to appear as a single GPU to the OS. This feature should be disabled (in BIOS if possible) and the drivers for "LucidLogix" or "Lucid" should be uninstalled. It is possible that they can interfere with the Quick Sync feature.

NVidia NVENC was introduced on the GeForce 600-series. That was several years ago and at this point, almost every NVidia card except the cheapest models have the NVENC feature. You can buy pretty much any "gaming" tier GeForce you'd like.

AMD VCE was introduced in the Radeon 7000-series, which is also several years old. Practically all of AMD's GPUs since then support VCE. Once again, you may buy pretty much any "gaming" tier Radeon card you want.

Lastly, you don't actually need any of these features to record your screen. Before these hardware-accelerated features existed you could use software like FRAPS. These days I would recommend OBS Studio, which is much newer and open source. It doesn't need the hardware features but it can use them if you have it.

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  • Thanks for the tip on OBS Studio. I'm using it already and it works great!
    – Michael
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 21:37
  • VLC can also do screen recording if you don't want to run OBS
    – Lawrence
    Commented Nov 18, 2019 at 2:53

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