Offloading encoding to PCIe card

[russinkungen]

A few years back I bought an Elgato HD60S which basically gave me nothing. I had the silly idea that it took care of encoding and it didn't. Good for recording Switch gameplay though.

So I'm looking into getting an internal PCIe card like the Elgato Pro series (or something else, I dunno yet). However I wonder if I can offload the entire encoding process. Say I embed realtime html, webcam, overlays and stuff into OBS, will the card just be able to record and encode this or just the stuff that is actually seen on screen (effectively forcing me to do final encoding on main gpu/cpu anyway). Not sure if I can choose in OBS what device should handle encoding. Didn't know what to search for in the forums so I appologize if this has already been answered. Also didn't know where on the forum to put it since there's no general discussions board.

 

[R1CH]

Using NVENC with a Turing / Ampere NVIDIA GPU is the currently the best hardware encoder. Dedicated hardware encoder cards are generally worse and unnecessary with how good NVENC is these days.

 

[amathyst_mlx]

The capture cards to nothing but what the name suggests: capture. They in no way share the encoding work load that your CPU/GPU will be tasked with. Your overlays, web sources and all other types of sources will consume those resources as well, so plan accordingly and think skinny thoughts :)

 

[FerretBomb]

The capture cards to nothing but what the name suggests: capture. They in no way share the encoding work load that your CPU/GPU will be tasked with. Your overlays, web sources and all other types of sources will consume those resources as well, so plan accordingly and think skinny thoughts :)

Slightly incorrect, just to clarify. SOME capture cards *do* have hardware encoders on-board. Either to squish video down to fit within the USB 2.0 bandwidth constraints, or for streaming. Unfortunately, the streaming ones are always proprietary encoders, only able to be used by the manufacturer's software, and are not accessible by OBS.
No big loss though, as the hardware encoders they include are, without fail, absolutely awful quality.