How helpful are capture cards?

eZGraviity · February 14

Hello,

Lately I've been getting more and more into recording gameplay with friends. There are no designs on making it into a profitable youtube channel or anything, we just enjoy sharing some of the more intense and cool gameplay moments. From these we create montages and such, see how nice we can make them just for the fun of it.

I have a bit of extra money to spend, and am curious if a capture card would be at all helpful for recording, I'm not sure if my setup is even being worked hard enough to need it or how to judge this... If a capture card would be helpful, what would be some good suggestions?

Core components are:

CPU: Intel Core i7-10700k

GPU: AMD RX 6800XT

Monitor: Dell 38" Curved Ultrasharp, 60hz

Its hard to describe, but when recording using OBS, I do feel a bit bogged down. Not to the point of adversely affecting gameplay, but something definitely feels different.

Stahlmann · February 14

Afaik capture cards only make sense if you have a secondary streaming machine or trying to record a console. Idk about AMD but Nvidia has a clips feature that always records in the background and depending on your settings will save the last 5 minutes as a video file after pressing a hotkey while deleting everything else when you close the game.

Imo a capture card doesn't make sense unless you're making money off it.

bal723 · February 14

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

Afaik capture cards only make sense if you have a secondary streaming machine or trying to record a console. Idk about AMD but Nvidia has a clips feature that always records in the background and depending on your settings will save the last 5 minutes as a video file after pressing a hotkey while deleting everything else when you close the game.

Imo a capture card doesn't make sense unless you're making money off it.

software has advanced alot

will0hlep · February 14

@eZGraviity

As @Stahlmann says, Capture cards are for when you want to game on one device (a Console or a PC) and screen record on another (The PC with the capture card in).

I don't agree with Stahlmann that they are only worth it if your making money off it. Such a statement ignores that idea of recording your game play for speedrunning or as a hobby itself. However, it sounds like you are playing games on PC, which means you'd only get any real advantage from your capture care if you build a second PC to put the capture card in.

LogicalDrm · February 14

There are only few capture cards that have hardware encoder. But as noted, they are mainly aimed to be for 2nd PC, console or something alike (older camera for example). So if you have extra money and want to buy something, think what you actually need or want to achieve first, don't fall into "streamers use this" advertising.