If you’re looking to start streaming on Twitch, you might have come across the GeForce Experience app on your PC. In this post, we’ll show you how to use basic overlays when streaming from the GeForce Experience app on your PC or specifically, in this case, a Shadow Cloud gaming PC. Although the function is exactly the same for a normal desktop PC.
First, you’ll need to create your overlays however you want to do that, but you want to make sure you save them as a PNG. For example, in Photoshop, you would go file save as and instead of saving as a JPEG or a Photoshop file, in the drop-down menu, make sure you save them as a PNG file.
Next, get them up to your Shadow Cloud gaming PC or if it’s your normal PC, save them in a folder where you know where they are. Then, you want to put Alt Z, bring up the GeForce Experience, click on settings underneath broadcast, and then if you click on the little three dots, you can then tell it where to look and then you can select which one you want.
The other aspect is how do you activate these files when you’re actually streaming? Probably the best way to look at that is if you just go into settings and then go into keyboard shortcuts and then scroll down, you’ll see custom overlays. The first one, toggle custom overlays on or off, will probably already be there, Alt plus F5.
So you start your stream to YouTube or Twitch or wherever and press Alt F5, and then your first overlay will appear. And then you’ve got to come up with the key bindings for the other ones, so what I’ve done is because there’s quite a few alts used, I’ve used Alt Shift F6 for overlay one, Alt Shift F7 for overlay two, Alt Shift F8 for overlay three.
It might be ideal to write that down and have it on a post-it note somewhere near your computer so you can actually see it. That way, as you’re doing your stream, you know you could do Alt F5 to turn it on, so you’ve got your first stream overlay there, the one that’s a stream starting soon. If you’ve got to go off and answer the door or go for a toilet break or make a drink, you press Alt Shift F7 to bring up your back in a bit one.
And then when your stream’s ending, you say thank you very much, go Alt Shift F8, that will bring up the stream ending thanks for watching please subscribe. You could leave that up for like 30 seconds before you end the stream to give you a nice bookend to the stream that way.
The beauty of this is that if you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card on your PC, laptop, or in this case, a cloud Shadow gaming PC, the ability to encode your stream or record gameplay is kind of built into the NVIDIA chipset. It uses very little overhead in terms of processor power, so it’s a very efficient way of encoding video and sending out. And probably more important, it’s a very simple way.
Once you’ve set it up and you’ve connected your accounts, it’s really simple. You just go live, and it’s great quality. It doesn’t really affect the performance of your PC as you’re playing, and it does exactly what it says in the tin, nothing else. To get you starting in streaming from a PC, it’s definitely a viable option.
That’s all for now. Hopefully, you find that useful.