Question / Help Capture Card use case to duplicate primary DP screen

[Mags]

Hello friends of the OBS forum!
I would like your input on this: I would like to stream Counter Strike Global offensive on a single PC but I can't seem to get good quality for the stream despite using a 8700K + 1080Ti either using GPU or CPU encoding. I've tried uping and decreasing the bitrate but it always seems to stutter or downright freeze so my question is this: would using a Capture card hooked up directly to one of the HDMI ports of the GPU, outputting a duplicate of my primary display (BenQ 144Hz monitor hooked up with Displayport) allow me to offload the encoding to the capture card or is that a waste of time and money? If something is unclear I can try and clarify

thanks!

 

[koala]

A capture card will not help you with OBS, because OBS is not able to use any capture card-specific encoder. Capture cards come with own streaming software that can make use of it, but this is completely without OBS. As far as I know, it may even possible that downloading captured frames from a capture card is even more resource intensive than game capture the game. By downloading from a capture card, you squeeze the data through an interface and a Windows driver, while with game capture OBS is simply doing a copy of data from shared memory.

You didn't post a log file, so we cannot see what happens at your system, but a common cause for problems like yours is that you run your game with unlimited fps, so it uses up all GPU resources. But OBS needs a small amount of GPU resources for itself, because it does the compositing and scaling of sources on the GPU. If it doesn't get its share of GPU resources, it isn't able to composite the video, thus a laggy and even choppy output. Limit the fps of your game by enabling vsync and/or some frame limiter to avoid this.

 

[Boildown]

The only reason to use a capture card with one PC is if you have a game too old to be captured by the OBS software capture methods. Other than that, you should either have a second PC to your gaming PC to put the capture card in, or a capture card will have worse performance than software capture, not better.