Capture cards?

[Turtle8bit]

Is there any improvement  between a capture card vs a screen capture software? 

[thekeemo]

what are you capturing?

[Guest Generallee]

Wrong section

 

And why do you compare capture cards and screen capture software ?

 

Capture cards are add on cards that capture an input signal and process it with their onboard processor 

 

Screen capture software, that's FRAPS or Shadowplay you're talking about

[Nico123473]

Normally a screen capture software can lower the performance of your system, except for shadowplay from Nvidia

[AMICLG]

If you use OSB with Intel Quicksync or Nvidia Shadowplay there's no performance hit also AMD has the same thing as Nvidia but I forgot what it's called.

[aricleather]

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/186453-how-to-record-gameplay-with-perfect-quality-no-fraps/

[skullbringer]

screen capture software runs on your computer and therefor requires your cpu or gpu to do the video compression and encoding. also you need to have an adequate storage setup that is fast and big enough to write and store the video files. going with a software solution can result in a performance hit, but is usually the cheaper option. examples are fraps, dxtory or camtasia.

 

capture cards are basically seperate mini computers if you will, that take the video output of your computer and use specialized encoding hardware to capture the video. some external come with a usb connection which requires a seperate computer to capture, some can write to a sd card, which of course has much smaller capacity. But due to the very efficient encoding and compression, the files are usually much smaller. as capture cards are basically dedicated hardware, this option is usally much more expensive but doest tax your gaming system with the load of capturing the video.