There are two ways for gamers to live broadcast now. One is to use live broadcast software, and the other is to use video capture cards. What are the advantages of using capture cards?
Capture cards can reduce CPU usage in the following ways when live broadcasting games:
1. Hardware encoding (hard coding): High-end capture cards have built-in hardware encoders that can directly handle the encoding of video streams, which means that the video encoding tasks that originally required the CPU or GPU can be handed over to the dedicated chip on the capture card to complete, thereby greatly reducing the CPU burden on the host computer.
2. Pass-through technology: Some capture cards have pass-through technology, which can directly pass the video signal losslessly to the live broadcast software without going through additional processing steps, which can save CPU resources.
3. Independent software control: The software included with some capture cards can independently pre-process and encode the video stream, which makes the live broadcast software do not have to perform the same processing, thereby reducing CPU usage.
4. Reduce preview rendering: When the game screen is captured by the capture card, the live broadcast software does not need to perform additional rendering and preview of the game screen, which can also save CPU resources.
5. Efficient data transmission: The capture card is connected to the computer through a high-speed interface (such as PCIe or USB 3.0 and above), which can quickly transmit data and reduce the CPU's overhead in data management and transmission.
6. Multi-machine separation solution: In professional live broadcast scenarios, capture cards are often used to implement dual-machine or multi-machine solutions, that is, one computer focuses on game operation, while the other computer (usually called the "live host") is only responsible for live encoding and streaming media transmission. This ensures that game operation and live encoding do not affect each other, and each runs on independent hardware resources to achieve optimal performance.
It should be noted that not all capture cards can provide a significant reduction in CPU usage. Low-end capture cards may only provide video signal capture without hardware encoding capabilities, so they still need to rely on the CPU for encoding. Therefore, when choosing a capture card, you should pay attention to whether it has hardware encoding capabilities, as well as its compatibility and efficiency with live broadcast software.
