How to record the mouse cursor in the NVIDIA App

What changed: GeForce Experience is gone

When I first wrote this, the app in question was GeForce Experience. That app no longer exists. NVIDIA moved everything into the NVIDIA App, which left beta on November 12, 2024 and formally replaced GeForce Experience with driver release 566.36. It swallowed the old NVIDIA Control Panel at the same time, so driver updates, game settings, the overlay and capture now all live in one place. Any GeForce Experience install still hanging around will prompt you to migrate and then remove itself.

The capture engine underneath is the same ShadowPlay lineage, and the overlay picked up some genuinely nice upgrades, including AV1 recording at up to 4K 120 FPS. What it did not pick up is a mouse cursor option. That request is now years old and still unanswered, which is why this post still exists.

The NVIDIA App still will not record your cursor

I have used NVIDIA's capture tools for years to record everything from gameplay to tutorials. It is an incredibly convenient setup, since it ships with the GeForce drivers and it is genuinely user friendly. That is exactly why hundreds of thousands of people reach for it to capture what they are doing.

The trouble starts the moment you record your screen for instructional purposes. The overlay will not record your mouse, and there is no option to turn it on anywhere in the platform. That is especially annoying when you are building a tutorial and viewers need to see where you are clicking to get anything out of it. I still do not understand why this is the case.

Rather than abandon a capture tool that otherwise works well, I went looking for a way to get the cursor into my recordings, whether through a third-party program or some kind of extension.

First, turn on Desktop Capture

This step did not exist in the GeForce Experience days and it catches people out constantly. The NVIDIA App treats recording your desktop as a privacy setting, and it is off by default. If it is off, the overlay will not capture the desktop at all, cursor or no cursor.

1. Open the overlay. Press Alt + Z, or use the overlay button at the top right of the NVIDIA App window.
2. Open Settings using the cog at the top of the overlay panel.
3. Scroll down to Privacy Control. It sits near the bottom of the settings list.
4. Turn on Desktop Capture. Without this, desktop recording simply will not start.

The fix: pointer trails, turned up until they vanish

After a lot of research I found nothing beyond switching to another program, which again is not what I wanted. So I took the problem back to basics and looked at the mouse properties in Windows to see what, if anything, could be done there.

There is an obscure option on the Pointer Options tab, under Visibility, called Display pointer trails. It leaves a trail of mouse cursors behind the original. I am not entirely sure who it was designed for, but it has one property that matters here: the trail actually does show up in a recording.

1. Open Mouse Properties. Press Win + R, type main.cpl and press Enter. On Windows 11 you can also go to Settings, then Bluetooth & devices, then Mouse, then Additional mouse settings.
2. Switch to the Pointer Options tab.
3. Under Visibility, tick Display pointer trails.
4. Leave the slider at Short and click Apply. The registry step below is what actually does the work.

The catch is that using this option as-is looks terrible in the recording, even set to one notch. Unless you move the mouse really slowly you will still see that extra cursor drifting around behind the pointer, which looks awful in a tutorial. I thought that was another dead end, until I found out you can push the setting further than the slider allows by editing its registry value.

Editing the MouseTrails registry value

Editing the registry means editing the settings that run your operating system. The pointer trails value is not going to break your computer, but it still means going into a part of Windows that most people do not know exists and even more people should not be poking around in. Take that as the warning it is meant to be.

1. Open the Registry Editor. Press Win + R, type regedit and press Enter.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse.
3. Double click MouseTrails. It is a String value, and it will currently hold whatever the slider set, normally a number from 2 to 7.
4. Replace the number with 70 and click OK.
5. If nothing looks different straight away, sign out and back in so Windows re-reads the value.

For some quirky reason, setting the pointer trail value really high actually makes the trails invisible. My best guess is that there are now so many cursor copies that they simply stack up behind the pointer instead of stringing out behind it as you move.

Turning the trail length absurdly high does not make the trail longer, it makes it disappear.

Recording with the cursor visible

With Desktop Capture enabled and the trail value set, your recordings will show the mouse cursor perfectly. Nothing about the way you record changes.

1. Start and stop a manual recording with Alt + F9, or from the Record panel in the overlay.
2. Save an Instant Replay clip with Alt + Shift + F10 if you would rather run a rolling buffer and keep the good bits.

To turn the cursor effect off again, open Mouse Properties and simply untick pointer trails. The nice thing is that the registry value stays where you put it, so when you tick the box again later it comes straight back at 70 with no second trip into regedit.

A fix that should not be necessary

One word of warning before you go: this setting may affect performance on lower end computers, since Windows is still rendering 70 cursors in the background. On a modern machine you will never notice it, but it is worth knowing if your system is already working hard while you capture.

Anyway, that is it. A fairly simple solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place, and one that has now survived an entire change of application. If NVIDIA ever adds a cursor checkbox to the overlay, this post can happily become obsolete. Until then, I hope it helps.