Question / Help AVerMedia ExtremeCap U3 not quite 60fps

[athairus]

I just got myself a new capture card, an AVerMedia ExtremeCap U3. Its big draw is its ability to capture at 1080p60 thanks to USB 3.0, no caveats or gotchas. Well, it does what it promises... sorta.

First off, my setup. I have a beefy gaming computer (specs not too important, it runs anything you can throw at it) that's hooked up via HDMI to a splitter that goes to both my monitor and the ExtremeCap U3. I've hooked up my ExtremeCap U3 to a 13" Macbook Pro with retina (CPU: i5-4288U, GPU: Intel Iris 5100 RAM: 16GB, OS: Windows 8.1).

To test how smooth my captured footage was, I ran RetroArch on my desktop with a special public domain SNES test ROM (no seriously, it is totally legal): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6484779/bsnesdemo.sfc. This ROM basically plays music and displays a checkerboard pattern that scrolls one pixel up and left every frame. If a single frame is duplicated, it's pretty obvious. It's great for making sure RetroArch is tuned properly to show buttery smooth video, which it is. But only from the desktop's side, not the captured footage.

Sample video (here the input is 1080p, scaled down to <720p): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6484779/bsnesdemo.mp4

Log: http://pastebin.com/ai3N0p6J

Here's a screenshot showing the CPU and GPU utilization while recording. It seems clear my hardware is not being fully taxed while recording.

I can't help but wonder if there's some subtle synchronization issue in play here... Even if I take the resolution of the input down to 720p and the OBS internal res to 848x480 (480p), I still get stutters.

In addition, I also get stutters (but not as bad) with AmaRecTV and with the bundled software, AVerMedia RECentral.

Could the devs share any insight?

 

[paibox]

Unless they've updated their drivers, the card does seem to have some issue with maintaining 60 frames per second even in AVerMedia's own application. I've since gotten rid of the card I had, so I unfortunately can't check if they have updated their stuff or not.

The (more noticeable) frame stutter in OBS is in short an issue with the frames from the capture card coming in right as the scene is being rendered, and thus never making it through. This is an issue that's very hard to tackle in the current version of OBS, but the new asynchronous source design in the rewrite of OBS is able to handle this in a much better way.

 

[athairus]

That's real unfortunate. I guess a card that can do 1080p/60 for under $300 was too good to be true...

I'd better get in touch with AVerMedia then.