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For video recording, you should definitely get OBS Studio first - it's an open-source, free software with tons of features.
OBS has a relatively large number of settings that you should check out in detail. In my opinion though, the most important settings can be found in the "Output" category, as shown in the adjacent image. If your hardware supports QuickSync, I recommend the settings shown in this image, which are optimized to ensure excellent quality of raw footage while keeping the file size as small as possible. In comparison, constant bitrates are completely unsuitable for this, since e.g. a data rate of 20 Mbit really adds those 20 Mbit every second, no matter if only a gray area or highly complex structures are shown. And if the structures are TOO complex, there are potentially even compression artifacts, as known from overcompressed JPG images, because the data rate may not be sufficient to describe the complexity.
The quality-related settings I use and recommend would store the gray area mentioned in this example using only a minimum amount of data - namely the precise amount of data actually needed - and use a correspondingly higher data rate for more complex visuals. There will be no compression artifacts as a result.
LA_ICQ stands for "Look Ahead + Intelligent Constant Quality". Its value can be compared with that of a quantizer, though LA_ICQ is clearly the better algorithm in direct comparison. The value can be between 1 and 51, with lower values resulting in exponentially better quality. Values in the range between 20 to 23 generally lead to very good quality. However, there are some cases, especially in conjunction with the red channel (e.g. in the case of thin red lines), where these values are not sufficient and artifacts still occur. I therefore stick to the value 16 for such algorithms, which from my experience always seems to be sufficient so far.
If your hardware does not support QuickSync, you can also use software encoding, as can be seen in the adjacent image at " Encoder: x264". NVIDIA NVENC might also be an option, although the recording quality almost always contains slight artifacts due to optimizations. In both cases, quantizer algorithms are again optimal for raw recordings - these are called CQP (Constant Quantization Parameter) and CRF (Constant Rate Factor), with CRF providing better results overall than CQP. Both, like the aforementioned LA_ICQ, also work with a quality/compression value between 1 and 51 (exception: CQP with 0 would be lossless) and I personally stick to a value of 16 for raw footage in all these algorithms nowadays.
In addition, if the option is available, "ultrafast" should be used as CPU usage preset, in order not to put an unnecessary load on the CPU, since you usually run a game for example, which also uses the CPU to calculate certain things.
I should also mention that for raw recordings you should use a streamable format - MP4 is not a good choice for this, because in case of an unexpected recording abort (e.g. due to a crash or power failure) the complete video file becomes corrupted and can't be restored anymore. I prefer to use MKV, which does not have this problem and can be processed relatively quickly by my video editing software.
OBS has a relatively large number of settings that you should check out in detail. In my opinion though, the most important settings can be found in the "Output" category, as shown in the adjacent image. If your hardware supports QuickSync, I recommend the settings shown in this image, which are optimized to ensure excellent quality of raw footage while keeping the file size as small as possible. In comparison, constant bitrates are completely unsuitable for this, since e.g. a data rate of 20 Mbit really adds those 20 Mbit every second, no matter if only a gray area or highly complex structures are shown. And if the structures are TOO complex, there are potentially even compression artifacts, as known from overcompressed JPG images, because the data rate may not be sufficient to describe the complexity.
The quality-related settings I use and recommend would store the gray area mentioned in this example using only a minimum amount of data - namely the precise amount of data actually needed - and use a correspondingly higher data rate for more complex visuals. There will be no compression artifacts as a result.
LA_ICQ stands for "Look Ahead + Intelligent Constant Quality". Its value can be compared with that of a quantizer, though LA_ICQ is clearly the better algorithm in direct comparison. The value can be between 1 and 51, with lower values resulting in exponentially better quality. Values in the range between 20 to 23 generally lead to very good quality. However, there are some cases, especially in conjunction with the red channel (e.g. in the case of thin red lines), where these values are not sufficient and artifacts still occur. I therefore stick to the value 16 for such algorithms, which from my experience always seems to be sufficient so far.
If your hardware does not support QuickSync, you can also use software encoding, as can be seen in the adjacent image at " Encoder: x264". NVIDIA NVENC might also be an option, although the recording quality almost always contains slight artifacts due to optimizations. In both cases, quantizer algorithms are again optimal for raw recordings - these are called CQP (Constant Quantization Parameter) and CRF (Constant Rate Factor), with CRF providing better results overall than CQP. Both, like the aforementioned LA_ICQ, also work with a quality/compression value between 1 and 51 (exception: CQP with 0 would be lossless) and I personally stick to a value of 16 for raw footage in all these algorithms nowadays.
In addition, if the option is available, "ultrafast" should be used as CPU usage preset, in order not to put an unnecessary load on the CPU, since you usually run a game for example, which also uses the CPU to calculate certain things.
I should also mention that for raw recordings you should use a streamable format - MP4 is not a good choice for this, because in case of an unexpected recording abort (e.g. due to a crash or power failure) the complete video file becomes corrupted and can't be restored anymore. I prefer to use MKV, which does not have this problem and can be processed relatively quickly by my video editing software.