Does the Capture Card or CPU do the work when streaming?

[PierreCCesario]

Ok, so my friend @oGvnnn is gonna get a new PC for gaming and streaming the games... My question is, does the Capture Card or CPU do the work when streaming? Also, if the Capture Card does do the work, which of the two offers higher quality? The CC in talk is the Elgato Game Capture HD. Not the 60fps version.

 

 

Thanks guys

[PierreCCesario]

take that out before a mod sees

lol

[APasz]

I'm not totally familiar with how things work when a capture card is involved but to my understanding, the capture card will do most of the heavy lifting and the cpu will simply be a traffic cop (which is what it does best ).

[minibois]

The CPU.

The capture card just takes the video from HDMI, splits it to HDMI and a USB cable -> feeds it to the PC where the CPU handles everything.

[PierreCCesario]

take that out before a mod sees

ok its gone

[PierreCCesario]

The CPU, the capture card just takes the video from HDMI, splits it to HDMI and a USB cable -> feeds it to the PC where the CPU handles everything.

oh ok! thanks

[PierreCCesario]

you're welcome

 

otherwise, i have no experience here, but i'm gonna say that (from what i've heard) the capture card is ONLY an input and the CPU still has to encode it all on the fly

ah, that explains it! thank you so much!

[PierreCCesario]

I'm not totally familiar with how things work when a capture card is involved but to my understanding, the capture card will do most of the heavy lifting and the cpu will simply be a traffic cop (which is what it does best ).

thanks  but people say that the cpu does the work.

[PierreCCesario]

crap. i forgot to use multiquote.

[Naeaes]

The capture card does most of the work but the CPU doesn't sit idle either. Coarsely you could say that the card produces the image (and audio) stream and the CPU deals with them. The memory buffer on the card can't be huge so the video needs to be stored temporarily somewhere else like in RAM. Which is where the CPU kicks in. Also since he's streaming the video online, there's another task for the CPU. Let alone maintaining the control softwares and drivers and so on.

But the bulk of the work relating to I/O operations with the input device and the creation of the video including decrypting HDCP and compressing it with a codec is done in the capture device.

[PierreCCesario]

The capture card does most of the work but the CPU doesn't sit idle either. Coarsely you could say that the card produces the image (and audio) stream and the CPU deals with them. The memory buffer on the card can't be huge so the video needs to be stored temporarily somewhere else like in RAM. Which is where the CPU kicks in. Also since he's streaming the video online, there's another task for the CPU. Let alone maintaining the control softwares and drivers and so on.

But the bulk of the work relating to I/O operations with the input device and the creation of the video including decrypting HDCP and compressing it with a codec is done in the capture device.

oh.. so some of the weight is lifted. nice! thanks for helping m8!

[oGvnnn]

Its me that wanted to know, got myself an account

[PierreCCesario]

Its me that wanted to know, got myself an account