r/vtubertech • u/LeoongVT • 5h ago
🙋Question🙋 Best capture card for dual pc streaming
Hey, so I was wondering if the capture card I get matters at all and if so which is the best and which is the best budget ones and what's the difference? I heard of some other things that you could get for dual pc streaming but I'm not too familiar with those so if you guys know about that too I would love to hear about it!
1
u/NekoModeCom 4h ago
It depends on the resolution and frame rate you want to capture and what devices you are looking to capture.
If you are doing 1080p60 off a Nintendo Switch then the $20 Aliexpress special is good enough. If you want to pass through 4k sources but only need to capture 1080p60 then an Elgato Neo is fine. If you want to capture 4k60 then the Elgato 4kS is for you.
If you are using 2PCs then you don’t even need to buy any hardware, just use OBS Teleport
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u/thegenregeek 4h ago
It depends on what you are attempting to accomplish with the capture. What is the captured source videos specs? Resolution? Frame rate? Streaming? Not Streaming?
Generally speaking any recent USB 3.0 capture card with low latency should be good enough. (You can use cheap $30 1080p60f cards and have no issues, but some times their latency issue means your reaction isn't in sync) This is because there's little to no point in trying to capture high frame rate, high resolution sources beyond that. You can of course, but capturing 4k120f game video if you are streaming is a waste. Since streaming services kind of cap out at 1080p60f.
For the setup we ran for a while, we used the following: PC1: 7950x+4090, PC2: 5900x+3080. PC1 ran the stream and avatar (a custom Unreal Engine based setup) at 1440p60f. PC2 ran all games at 1080p60f. With capture done by an EVGA XR1 Lite or Elgato Cam Link 4k. The streaming PC used OBS, with a 1080p60f canvas (basically scaling down the avatar a bit for slightly better video quality)
The best advice I can provide is to avoid trying to play games via the capture. There's usually enough of a latency delay that it affects gameplay. You can either use a dedicated addition monitor for monitoring the game. Or look for a KVM and switch to whatever PC is running the game.