The lowest‑overhead instant replay for Windows.

Records your game. Then gets out of the way.

• A tray icon and one small window. No overlay, no account, no launcher. It waits for a full-screen game and records it.
• Cheaper than Instant Replay. Less CPU and fewer lost frames than NVIDIA's at the same settings, measured in-game.
• Buffer in RAM, VRAM or on disk. Keep the replay wherever your machine has room to spare.
• H.264, HEVC or AV1 at up to 240 fps. With system sound as AAC. The settings only offer what your GPU can encode.

Three steps, about a minute.

1. Run the installer.

   It is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may stop it the first time. Choose More info, then Run anyway. Prefer no installer? Unzip the portable build anywhere.

2. Launch hindsight from the Start menu.

   It sits in the tray, waits for a full-screen game, and records it.

3. Press Alt+F10 to save a clip.

   Change the hotkey, codec, frame rate and buffer in the Settings tab.

Your game keeps the CPU. The capture never leaves the GPU.

• Nothing touches the CPU's memory. Each frame is copied once, on the GPU, into a texture NVENC owns, and NVENC converts and encodes it on its own silicon. With NvFBC the encoder reads the grab where the driver left it, so even that copy goes.
• The CPU never reads the video. NVENC reports each frame's type, so packets go into the buffer without being parsed.
• Nothing polls. A waitable timer wakes the capture thread once per frame, in the multimedia scheduling class, and three encode slots rotate so it never waits on the GPU.
• Nothing runs on the shader cores. Single-pass rate control, no B-frames, no lookahead, no adaptive quantization. An unchanged screen is repeated GPU-side.
• Capture gets the GPU first. High GPU thread and scheduling priority, never realtime, and no power throttling.
• Sound is kept raw. It is encoded to AAC only when you save, on the saving thread. Long silences are dropped.
• Saves run in the background. At low CPU, I/O and memory priority, so they never compete with the game.

Run as administrator for the highest GPU priority. To check for yourself, compare CPU use and frame times in PresentMon or CapFrameX with hindsight, with Instant Replay and with neither.

What each setting costs, in short.

1. Keep the NVIDIA NvFBC backend. It is the default and costs the game least. Switch to Windows Graphics Capture for a laptop whose display hangs off the integrated GPU, or for HDR.
2. Record at the frame rate your clips need. Cost scales with frames captured, not with codec or bitrate. 60 fps costs about a third of what 240 fps does.
3. Pick the best codec your card offers. They all cost the same CPU; they differ in picture per bit.
4. Keep the buffer in RAM if you have the room. Otherwise VRAM if the card has the room, otherwise Disk on an SSD. Its size is bitrate × length: 30 s at 50 Mb/s is about 190 MB.
5. Turn off system sound if you never use it. It is cheap, under a fifth of the video's CPU, but not free.

The full guide, with every backend and buffer option: Getting the best performance.

Check that your copy is the real one.

This proves where the file came from, not that the code is free of bugs; that is what the public source is for. Fingerprints for every file: SHA256SUMS.txt.