For whatever reason I can't discern, the recording capture software Mirillis Action! does NOT even detect For Honor as a game using the DirectX/OpenGL recording mode regardless of recording settings. The HUD won't even show up in it. This is the only game so far that has done this as far as I can remember outside of freely distributed games developed by regular internet people (NOTE: it works completely fine with other Ubisoft/Uplay games like Rainbow Six Siege). It can record the game using Active Screen, Active Desktop Region, and Selected Application (forhonor.exe) recording modes but as I'll mention below the results are far from acceptable (I'm pretty sure LEGO ISLAND would look smoother).
(NOTE: even more bizarrely, regardless of any settings, Mirillis Action's screenshot feature still works with For Honor without it even detecting the game, so... I don't even... wha...?)

However, if the file format is set to "MP4 (NVIDIA NVENC)", 1) For Honor will not launch if the program is open with that setting beforehand, and 2) For Honor will INSTANTANEOUSLY close or crash if the program is opened with that setting even after the game fully launches. Recording in any other file type (regular MP4 or AVI) using the other modes the 60 FPS at 720p recording ends up a horrendously choppy mess the equivalent of what I assume would be less than 20 FPS and even lower than that when I tried recording at 30 FPS (and I have fiddled with every possible other setting in the program from multicore rendering to input range.

Wait, something's not right... I DID record using NVIDIA NVENC encoding during this Open Beta... yeah, no, wait, on day 1 when I switched to NVIDIA NVENC encoding after launching the game, I was able to record using the display/selected application capture modes in Action. I'm sure of it, because when it wouldn't work at all the next day I tried recording without NVIDIA NVENC and the game's performance tanked drastically (skipping like 80% of frames) to an absolutely unplayable level. That was when I moved on to the next step below...

I haven't tested with NVIDIA Shadowplay yet, but I downloaded the free recording software OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), and while it is incomprehensibly more complicated to set up, it functions completely fine using NVIDIA NVENC encoding, recording at full 60 FPS at whatever settings I desire with absolutely no impact on performance and just-as-specified recording output. This feels absolutely bizarre.

...OH, WAIT, HOLD UP, HOLD THE PHONE. I just checked and I have recordings from an earlier Alpha test of For Honor (that wasn't under NDA) using Mirillis Action! and they're fine - not only did Mirillis Action! detect For Honor (Alpha) as a game using the DirectX/OGL recording mode (displaying the HUD in-game), but it recorded at 60 FPS at 1080p (as opposed to 720p like I tried now) and at over 13000kbps bitrate (over 2 to 3 times higher than what I currently record at). Now that I think about it... I think there was an issue using the "MP4 (NVIDIA NVENC)" encoding back then, too, but only when the game launched and the recordings came out at the full framerate (or if it actually didn't work and I'm mistaken, then the MP4 encoding without NVIDIA NVENC still came out infinitely better than the current results).

Seriously... help... I just don't understand... what the heck is happening...?? It works but... then it doesn't... buhh...?

(I could look into getting a hold of an old version of Action!, like the one from that Alpha, but I dunno... the amount of inconsistencies is nuts...)

PS) the reason why I want Mirillis Action to work is relatively minor (aside from being really good about recording file size, and being what I use for everything else) because it's much simpler to note what recordings are what without tabbing out from the game and manually renaming files between matches since I can create bookmarks on recordings and mark recordings as favorites during the process (where I tend to mark more interesting recordings with both, wins as favorites, and noteworthy losses with only bookmarks). I'd still like to figure out what's going on, though.


I am running this on an Alienware 17x laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M. The game runs completely fine, even while recording to an external hard drive using either Action! (in the Alpha and the first day of the Open Beta) or OBS.