Question / Help Video Capture cards 2016

[mannythemammoth]

i have been mulling over getting a capture card for a second pc for a while, i read this

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/once-and-for-all-does-a-capture-card-help.8024/

with respect to a single pc setup which provided really great responses to a common question. With regards to both single and double pc setups in 2016 does the capture card give significant improvements over screen record and direct streaming software such as obs, shadowplay streaming steam streaming and facebook/blizzard stream. As a separate thread i would love to see performance/quality comparisons of those four bits of software but like i said another separate thread

i apologise if this is the wrong subforum, please redirect me if it is

 

[Harold]

In a single pc setup, capture cards are somewhere between 0 performance difference and a performance loss, depending on the card and the rest of the setup.

 

[Roids0777]

I use a 2 stream pc set up and I have an Avermedia Live Gamer Hd card. It's been fantastic so far. My obs settings on my Stream pc are Medium preset, Lanzcos filtered, high cpu profile. and It only uses 37% cpu usage.

Although in regards to getting the audio to work in a 2 stream pc is quite another beast.

 

[Boildown]

Its only worth it on a dual-PC system (or console-PC when you want to stream what's on your console).

IMO the main benefit is not having to give a frak about the CPU usage of whatever you're streaming. Not caring if Microsoft pushed down a Windows 10 update that broke game capture (for the dozenth time). Not caring if the latest game that everyone wants to see is completely unoptimized.

New games are going to use more and more cores and threads and generally more of the CPU, as programmers learn to multi-thread their games better. This means that the unused cores that for years OBS has relied on will be less and less available to OBS, making streaming harder and harder. While an i5 used to be good enough, now people are starting to need or at least want an i7 or an extreme CPU. Getting a 2nd PC and a capture card just completely bypasses all these problems.

Plus I personally think its just damn awesome. I'm a hobbiest that likes video encoding. But even that not considered, if you can afford about $1200 for a 2nd PC, then you can have super-nice dedicated encoding solution that won't get worse as games get more complex. Check out this guide, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/47bzdc/budget_friendly_secondary_streaming_pc_guide

 

[Roids0777]

Its only worth it on a dual-PC system (or console-PC when you want to stream what's on your console).

IMO the main benefit is not having to give a frak about the CPU usage of whatever you're streaming. Not caring if Microsoft pushed down a Windows 10 update that broke game capture (for the dozenth time). Not caring if the latest game that everyone wants to see is completely unoptimized.

New games are going to use more and more cores and threads and generally more of the CPU, as programmers learn to multi-thread their games better. This means that the unused cores that for years OBS has relied on will be less and less available to OBS, making streaming harder and harder. While an i5 used to be good enough, now people are starting to need or at least want an i7 or an extreme CPU. Getting a 2nd PC and a capture card just completely bypasses all these problems.

Plus I personally think its just damn awesome. I'm a hobbiest that likes video encoding. But even that not considered, if you can afford about $1200 for a 2nd PC, then you can have super-nice dedicated encoding computer that won't get worse as games get more complex. Check out this guide, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/47bzdc/budget_friendly_secondary_streaming_pc_guide

^ Couldn't have said it any better.