Question / Help Capture Card 1 PC setup

[SirHolmes]

Hello everyone one,

I am relatively new to streaming and have a question. In a single PC setup how is a capture card taking any strain off the cpu in terms of streaming? OBS is still taking the video from the PC and encoding it off to the stream. Where in there is the CPU and GPU having any less strain? I am looking for a very technical breakdown for this subject so please try and provide that for me.

Sincerely,
SirHolmes

 

[paibox]

A capture card in a single PC setup won't take any strain off the CPU.

 

[SirHolmes]

Then Is there any point in getting a capture card for single PC setup?

 

[dodgepong]

The only reasons you might want to use capture card on a single PC setup is if you need to capture a game that can't be captured with Window or Game capture due to it using hackshields or old versions of DirectX, or of you want the effect of monitor capture without the performance impact of monitor capture or the strange behavior of monitor capture on fullscreen games.

 

[alpinlol]

and for lazy peoples who want only one scene which would be the capture card doing everything ...

 

[SirHolmes]

The only reasons you might want to use capture card on a single PC setup is if you need to capture a game that can't be captured with Window or Game capture due to it using hackshields or old versions of DirectX, or of you want the effect of monitor capture without the performance impact of monitor capture or the strange behavior of monitor capture on fullscreen games.

By "capture" do you mean record to my HDD? I understand the hackshields or old DirectX but what do you mean by

"or of you want the effect of monitor capture without the performance impact of monitor capture or the strange behavior of monitor capture on fullscreen games."

I though that OBS would still be doing all the work (taking the videos game, encoding, and then putting it on the stream) thereby distributing all the work onto the CPU and not using the capture card at all. Would the capture card essentially be doing nothing if only acting as a pass through?

 

[dodgepong]

By "capture" I mean get it to show up in OBS when you preview or start recording/streaming.

OBS will still be doing all of the work and the capture card would only be...well...capturing, not alleviating load. I guess you could think of it as a passthrough, or a loopback. The reason I bring up monitor capture is because some people want to stream whatever is on their monitor no matter what and attempt to do this with Monitor capture, but monitor capture can't capture fullscreen games and on Windows 7/Vista monitor capture gives very poor performance.

 

[FerretBomb]

Also if you were streaming from a console. But then that's not really a 1 PC setup any more, it's a 1PC+Console.

But yes, for a VAST majority, a capture card is a pointless purchase, done under the expectation that it will make streaming easier or take some load off the CPU. Which it really won't, unless you're using their software instead of OBS (and the card has onboard hardware encoding, which tends to look like crap, especially AVerMedia's).