4k Capture Card on High end PC yay or nay

[vindicatorjones]

Hi everyone, I have recently upgraded my rig, and I am now running an AMD 5800x with a RTX 3080 and 32 gigs of Ram

I used to always record my youtube videos in OBS without a card at 1920x1080, but I am now running a 3440 x 1440 ultrawide screen. I am also considering streaming.

So do I need a capture card? or am I just throwing money into the wind?

I am wanting to capture high quality video, and stream at full resolution (my net can handle it).

I am looking at getting either an AVerMedia GC573 (pci express) or an Elgato 4K60 pro mk.2

Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Tomasz Góral]

Perhaps this is not the complete answer to your question, i have GC553 (yes is for USB) working with 2160p30 (i use 2160p25). But i also have a BMD Quad HDMI PCIE and all working correct for 4K resolution.
But time to time GC553 show lower fps (ReCentral show 45-47 FPS but source set to 1080p50), after reconnect the device return to stable 50 fps.

 

[koala]

Capturing you own PC with a capture card built in that PC is vastly more resource intensive than using one of the internal capture methods of OBS (game capture, window capture, display capture). This is because with the latter the video data is already in GPU memory. OBS is directly reading the frame buffer of the app you're capturing. Acquiring data this way needs almost no resources. But if you use a capture card, the data has to be imported from the capture card into CPU memory (this is done by the capture card driver), then again copied to GPU memory (this is done by OBS), where compositing takes place.

Use a capture card only to capture external devices such as gaming consoles.