Commercial licensing question: NvFBC / Capture SDK access for GeForce screen recording software

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Hello,

I want to clarify NVIDIA’s official position on NvFBC / Capture SDK usage for Windows screen recording on consumer GeForce GPUs.

From the public Capture SDK license and documentation, it appears that NvFBC / Capture SDK usage is restricted to GRID, Tesla, or Quadro hardware, and not generally permitted on GeForce GPUs.

However, some consumer-facing software appears to expose NvFBC-related capture options on GeForce systems. For example, Steam Remote Play includes a setting named “Use NVFBC capture on NVIDIA GPU.” This creates confusion for independent developers, because it is unclear whether such access is available through an official NVIDIA partner/license path, legacy whitelist, private agreement, or some other permitted mechanism.

Could NVIDIA clarify the following:

  1. Is there any officially supported or licensed way for an independent Windows application to use NvFBC / Capture SDK on GeForce RTX GPUs?

  2. If some applications are allowed to use NvFBC on GeForce, what is the official process for requesting the same access?

  3. If the public Capture SDK license restricts usage to GRID, Tesla, or Quadro hardware, does that mean GeForce usage is not permitted even if it technically works?

  4. Is it permitted for software to ask the user for explicit consent and then patch, modify, or install a third-party patch for NVIDIA drivers to enable NvFBC on GeForce hardware?

  5. From a technical perspective, NvFBC appears to be NVIDIA’s lowest-overhead capture path for feeding captured frames into a GPU/NVENC-based pipeline. If this path is restricted from independent GeForce software while selected consumer applications can expose it, how should independent developers obtain equivalent access, or is this access intentionally unavailable to them?

I am not asking for instructions to bypass restrictions. I only want to understand what is legally permitted, officially supported, and driver-stable, especially because other consumer software appears to expose this functionality.

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I am so lost too about this concept, the most mysterious thing Nvidia has done.. Like it’s not for public and only for Pro GPU cards but ok Steam and Nvidia App can let us use it with our RTX consumer cards? As independant devs we feel discriminated as it makes no sense, especially that it is the best way to capture games without getting banned online.

Will a competent moderator answer this mystery??

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NvFBC was deprecated on Windows 10 already and “replaced” with DDA (Desktop Duplication API).

4

how is this answer from nvidia officials?
it’s not deprecated
it’s being used by valve
it’s being used by your own shadowplay
you are straight up lying

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this is a screenshot i just made using steam link, which uses nvfbc to capture and encode frames

the funny thing is, if you try to launch nvidia shadowplay while steam link is running, shadowplay simply won’t work because of the api limitation that allows only one application to load the dll at a time

it was never deprecated and is still actively used by nvidia and other companies

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Why are you lying ? It’s still actively updated through your nvidia drivers, why are you lying to people? Why can’t we use it to develop our own capture software ? Just reply

Windows Methods are trash and destroy Frame temporality and gameplay PERFORMANCE, file ends up not smooth without this low level capture technique (NvFBC)

6

You are posting in the vGPU forums. Main use case for NvFBC in the context of vGPU is the use of NVENC in remoting protocols. As I said, NvFBC is deprecated!

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There might be other use cases for NvFBC and I never said it is not used any more.
But don’t expect to get a different response for an offtopic post.