How to clip gameplay, in three moves. Record the session with whatever you already use, drop the file into CutBench, and let your own GPU rank it into vertical clips with captions burned in. You approve the ones worth posting. The whole pass runs on your PC, so nothing uploads and there is no monthly bill.
Clipping gameplay splits into two jobs: capturing the footage, and finding the twenty seconds inside three hours that are worth posting. Capture is already solved by whatever recorder you use. The second job is the one that eats your evening, and it is the one CutBench takes. Here is the whole loop.
Steps two and four want a few minutes of your attention. Step three runs unattended with the game closed, which is why the usual pattern is to start it when you stop playing and read the list in the morning.
There is nothing to install into your game, no overlay and no capture hook. CutBench reads a finished video file off your drive, so the recorder question stays entirely yours.
On settings: a clean 1080p60 recording is plenty of source for a vertical clip. Recording higher costs you overhead during play and buys very little once the frame is cropped to 9:16 for a phone screen. If your recorder is the thing costing you frames, that is a separate problem with its own fixes, and it has its own page on clipping software that doesn’t lower FPS. Recorder defaults and output formats change, so these notes were checked on 14 August 2026.
Once the file is in, everything happens on your own NVIDIA GPU. It reads the picture as well as the sound rather than watching a volume meter, and knowing where that helps and where it does not is worth more to you than a feature list.
What it does not do: there is no text recognition anywhere in it. Nothing reads your kill feed, your scoreboard or any other text on screen. Silent gameplay with no voice and a quiet mix is the case where it has the least to go on, and it is fair to expect a weaker list there.
A three-hour session takes roughly 2 to 5 hours on an RTX 3060 class GPU. Longer sessions are covered in how to clip a 3-hour stream, and how an AI clip maker for gaming works goes deeper into the scoring itself.
This is the part people expect to be an editor, and it is not one. You get a ranked list, you watch the candidates, you keep or bin each one. No timeline, no track stack, no keyframes. That is deliberate: the reason a session sits unclipped for three weeks is usually that opening an editor feels like starting a project.
What comes out is a 9:16 clip with captions burned in, plus a suggested hook and hashtags you can edit before anything goes anywhere. From the same screen, YouTube Shorts is a direct scheduled upload. TikTok receives the video into your drafts inbox, where the last tap is yours: you finish the caption and post it from the TikTok app.
Most tools that rank gameplay for you want the footage on their servers first, plus a monthly fee to keep the tap open. CutBench runs the same kind of pass locally instead. Transcription, perception, ranking and rendering all happen on your GPU, which changes three things: nothing uploads, there is no queue in front of you, and there is no bill next month. In plain terms it is an offline clip maker: unplug the network and the same session still comes back as clips. If you are still choosing between the recorders and the cutting tools, the best clipping software for PC puts them in one table.
| CutBench (local) | Cloud clippers | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your footage runs | Your PC | Their servers |
| Your raw footage | Never leaves your PC | Uploaded to a third party |
| Pricing model | One-time license | Monthly subscription |
| Upload limits | None · local disk | Tier-capped |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Turnaround | Your GPU, overnight | Cloud queue |
| Sign-up before it runs | None · install from Steam | Account first |
Typical cloud clip-tool terms as of 14 August 2026. Specific plans vary by provider and tier.
Where your files go. CutBench opens the capture file from the folder you point it at and writes the clips next to it. There is no upload step, no storage bucket, and no account to create before it will process anything. You can disconnect the network entirely and the full pipeline still finishes: transcription, perception, ranking, and render all run on your own GPU. Voice chat, party comms, footage of a build you are not allowed to show yet, none of it moves off the drive it was recorded to.
What uploading costs you. Local captures are recorded far above stream bitrate, so the file is big: three hours recorded at 50 Mbit/s is about 67 GB, where the same three hours pulled back down as a compressed broadcast VOD is closer to 6 to 9 GB. Your home uplink is the bottleneck either way. At 20 Mbit/s up, 67 GB is more than seven hours of sending before a cloud tool has even looked at the footage, and a dropped connection means starting that over. A local pass reads the same file off your SSD instead, so the clock starts the moment you drop the file in.
If you already know the exact moment you want and it happened ten minutes ago, trimming it yourself is faster than any ranking pass, and if you want it in Discord within seconds of the play, that is what your recorder’s hotkey is for. A pass over the whole session earns its keep when the session is long and you genuinely do not remember what is in it.
Two hard limits before you download anything. CutBench needs Windows 10 or 11 and an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer. On an AMD or Intel Arc card, or on macOS or Linux, it does not run at all, and there is no CPU mode to fall back to.
Record the session with whatever recorder you already use, then hand the finished file to a tool that cuts it. With CutBench that means pointing it at the recording once you have stopped playing, letting the pass run on your GPU, and reviewing the ranked vertical clips it hands back. You approve the ones you want and post them from the same screen.
Let the ranking do the finding. CutBench scores the whole session, cuts the moments it rates highest to 9:16, and burns in the captions, so your job is watching a shortlist and saying yes or no. It is not a timeline editor: you approve clips, you do not arrange them.
Anything that writes a normal MP4 or MKV: OBS Studio, NVIDIA ShadowPlay and the NVIDIA app, Medal, Outplayed, or Xbox Game Bar. CutBench is not a recorder and does not install into your game. Steam game recording is the one exception worth noting, because it stores a session as chunked segments, so export the part you want to MP4 from Steam first.
On an RTX 3060 class GPU, roughly 2 to 5 hours running unattended with the game closed. A cloud tool has to receive the file first: three hours recorded at 50 Mbit/s is about 67 GB, which at 20 Mbit/s up is more than seven hours of sending before any clipping starts.
No. There is no text recognition anywhere in it, so nothing reads a kill feed, a scoreboard or any other text on screen. It reads the picture as well as the sound, and Rust and ARC Raiders were tuned on real footage from those games.
No. Your source files never leave your PC. Everything runs locally on your own GPU.
Yes. It runs fully offline. The network is only touched when you choose to send a finished clip out: a scheduled upload to YouTube Shorts, or into your TikTok drafts inbox.
Yes. Buy once on Steam. No subscription, no per-clip credits. A free demo runs the full pipeline with a small watermark.
Windows 10 or 11 and an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB+ VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer. AMD and Intel Arc GPUs are not supported, and there is no macOS or Linux build.
The free demo runs the whole pipeline on your PC, on a recording you already have. Buy once when you are ready to drop the watermark.