Question / Help Live Gamer HD Lite - decrease CPU load with OBS?

[sneaky4oe]

Hi, I just bought this capture card and kinda upset about it's job. I'm streaming from the same PC I'm playing on, but it seems that I can't setup that card properly to work. I already have installed it's drivers, updated a firmvare to the latest version and installed Stream Engine from it's elder brother (without "Lite" in name). In Dota 2 I used to have about 30 FPS in heavy load scenes (while 50 fps without stream). With same preset I get same or lower FPS with both "Live Gamer HD" and "Streaming Engine" video sources.

I'm on Win8 pro and my PC specs are these:

PSU: THERMALTAKE TR2 TRX-850M Bronze, 850W
Motherboard: ASROCK 970DE3/U3S3 SocketAM3 +
Cooler: Thermalright Macho HR-02
Case: ATX ZALMAN Z9 Plus, Midi-Tower
memory module: 2x PATRIOT DDR3-4GB, 1333 , DIMM
Sound Card: CREATIVE X-Fi Titanium, 7.1
CPU: AMD FX 8120 @ 3.8GHz
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHZ EDITION 2GB

Mouse: RAT5
Keyboard: A4TECH X7-G800
Gamepad: Logitech F710
Monitor: Philips 274E, AOC M2752V
Mat: A4Tech X7-700MP
Speakers: Edifier M3700
Headphones: SteelSeries Siberia Full-size Headset v2
Webcam: Logitech C270

OBS settings:


This is what I get with such settings on twitch via avermedia 5mbit/s: http://www.twitch.tv/sneaky4oe/b/490465075
And this is what I get with settings of my main stream vi game capture at 2.5 mbit/s: http://www.twitch.tv/sneaky4oe/b/490465860

FPS is in top right corner.

FPS on card stream really makes me sad. Can you please help me to setup it to decrease CPU usage and increase FPS in the game?

 

[Lain]

If you are using a single-PC setup for streaming, then the capture device will do you no real favors. The built in capture methods are superior to using a capture device to capture the same machine, in just about every possible way. Game capture in particular uses no CPU, it does not transfer any data to RAM, and is not manipulated by the CPU in any form during capture. It gives you completely uncompressed RGB video from your game. It uses your graphics adapter entirely to do this, and is about as efficient as you could possibly get for capturing.

For single PC setups, capture cards have to capture the image from HDMI, transfer it back through to RAM, it must then be processed on the CPU to convert to the compressed chroma to uncompressed chroma, then it has to go back on to the GPU for compositing. The image quality is a compressed YUV4:2:0 image, which means there is a minor loss to color accuracy.

For these reasons, using a capture card to capture the same PC is actually a bit detrimental to both your CPU usage and image quality, rather than beneficial. The only benefit that it allows you is to capture the monitor without having to worry about aero on windows 7 or fullscreen games or alt-tabbing, but monitor capture on windows 8+ is already superior in that regard and also has full RGB capturing direct to GPU memory as well, so those benefits become moot if using windows 8+ as well. A capture card will however allow you to capture very old games unsupported by game capture, so I suppose there's that I guess.

I really hate having to tell you this because I know a capture card is an investment, but for streaming the same PC, you're better off not using it for that purpose.

There are however other great purposes for it, for example a 2-PC setup as well as capturing consoles is where a capture card is really useful. Using a second PC to offload encoding and streaming is not uncommon, though requires a second computer. Also, a capture card is of course the only way to capture consoles, so they are always fantastic to have if you have a console. I can play my xbox 360 directly through OBS for example.

 

[sneaky4oe]

All right... Thanx than. I wonder what AverMedia support will tell me about "increasing streaming performance" than.
For now I think I'll keep it for a while - it still allows to record old DX7 games that doesn't allow to stream ingame videos. And local records via their software almost doesn't load my CPU as well... :-/

And I can always resell it for it's initial price - I know that there are few streamers from my city who would like to get that card to stream from consoles.

By the way, if I want to stream dynamic shooters in fullHD 30 FPS, what hardware for a second PC should I use? Because I'm fine with building a shitty PC without a videocard for the sake of decreasing load on my main one.