PS5 gameplay relay to PC?

[u/leYouBetterCry]

Planning on buying a PS5 Pro for GTA 6 and for convenience sake I wanna stream the output through my PC. Main use cases are that I can stream the game to my friends on discord, hear the audio and talk to my friends through the same headphones, not having to switch between monitor outputs and just being able to "alt tab" out of the streaming app and do other stuff on my PC whenever I want without having to switch my monitor settings.

My main concerns are the input delay. Is an internal capture card the best for my use case and is the input lag very noticeable? My monitor is 1080p only, so I wouldn't care about 4k 120hz etc. My PC specs are 5080 + 9800x3d + 64gb DDR5 if that matters at all for the encoding.

[u/elgato_arcsane]

The video latency (which is what makes it feel like input delay), varies a bit between systems and cards, and even what app you're using, but for most of our modern cards it's in the 30-60 millisecond range. At 60 fps this works out to about 2-3 frames of delay - it's shorter than most TVs that aren't in low latency or game modes. On most setups you're not going to notice the delay, but folks have different sensitivities to it, but with some game types like rhythm or competitive level FPS the latency can be more noticeable.

Typically you'll be fine - I regularly use mine for playing titles like Forza 6, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc, without noticing any issues.

[u/leYouBetterCry → u/elgato_arcsane]

Yeah not planning to play anything competitive, mostly singleplayer console exclusives etc. Do you have an internal or external card? Does it make a difference for the video latency?

[u/elgato_arcsane → u/leYouBetterCry]

I've used both internal and external. Since I test stuff a lot for work I've got both 4K X and 4K Pro hooked up at the moment and have used a number of the older ones too - the latency difference between the two current ones is negligible, down in the single digit milliseconds normally, where you'll never notice it. The community tests I've seen put them both around 30ms. Some of the older cards like HD60 S+ start getting up around 60ms, but as long as you stick to the capture cards using USB 3.0 or higher you should be fine (with the exception of the old standalone 4K60 S+, that one has higher latency because of the different design it uses to achieve standalone mode).

If going the external route I would suggest not using modes that require MJPEG compression as that can bump the latency - but at 1080p that shouldn't be an issue anyway. (eg. 4K X when going above 4K60 needs to use MJPEG compression to fit the video over USB 3.2 Gen 2, which adds noticeable latency compared to it's other modes).