Question / Help Help regarding hardware setup

[nubcake]

Hi,

I play battlefield 4 but I would like to stream the content at 1080p 60FPS.

My main PC is an i7 @ 4.4GHz / 8GB RAM / 7970, 120Hz gaming monitor.
I also have an MSI GS70 laptop i7 4700HQ.

Now I want as little performance impact on my game as possible.

From what I have read in various places I have come to the conclusion that I must have an external capture device which will feed the video into my laptop which can then encode on OBS and stream. Apparently hardware encoders aren't as good as OBS on a CPU...

What are my choices for external capture? I've looked at the avermedia U3, the blackmagic intensity and the live gamer HD. The U3 is the only one that seems to be able to do 60FPS pass through or is that wrong?

Is there an internal capture card that will do it on my gaming pc with zero performance impact?

If I use an external capture device and I do duplicate the image on my gaming PC to output it to the capture device will windows lower the refresh rate from 120Hz to 60Hz or will it maintain the 120Hz? (I ask this because on my second monitor the max refresh rate is 60Hz, if I duplicate the image it will lower the gaming monitor to 60Hz)

 

[nubcake]

I just had another thought. If I capture the game without streaming (using dxtory or something) can I send it over my home network to the laptop via Ethernet and then encode then stream via the laptop?

 

[Lain]

If you want as little performance impact on your games as possible, best thing to do is use a 2-pc setup. Otherwise, use game capture and quicksync on the game to really reduce impact as much as possible. Using a capture device to capture the same PC that the device is hooked up to will have less performance than game capture. Game capture is about as great in terms of capture performance as you can possibly get.

You could probably be perfectly fine even without quicksync on that computer. If recording, there are some tricks you can use to reduce encoding CPU usage. But for general streaming, the best way to reduce performance is to just use lower resolution/fps.

 

[nubcake]

Hi Jim, thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately my motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 does not have a video out port so does not support quicksync in any kind of way. I think if I had this feature I would agree with you.

I have had a stream up at 1280x720 (medium, fast, faster) with my current setup but I can see micro stuttering, slightly on BF4 but massively on Dead Island, it even occurs on small games like Bit Trip. This is what I want to get away from.

edit:

Check out this Dead island video: http://www.twitch.tv/creomortis/b/490579274

It may not be as obvious on the video but actually on my PC it is 10 times worse. Very frustrating.

I use Game capture when ever I can.

 

[Lain]

Medium/fast/faster? Is that x264 preset? If so you need to set that to veryfast. Even on a monster computer those will exponentially increase CPU usage. 'veryfast' is the recommended best value preset in terms of CPU usage and quality.