The Best Capture Cards

A capture card exists to get video from a device that is not your computer — a console, a second machine, or a real camera — into your computer, without ruining the experience on the device.

Two specifications, not one

Capture is what reaches your computer. Pass-through is what reaches your monitor.

These differ, often substantially, and the pass-through is the one that decides what your gameplay feels like. A card that captures at a modest resolution but passes through at your monitor’s full capability is the right trade for most people, because your viewers see a compressed stream anyway and you see the pass-through. That is the trade the Elgato Game Capture HD60 X (at Amazon, opens in a new tab) makes. The Elgato Game Capture 4K X (at Amazon, opens in a new tab) is the pick when the capture itself has to match what you play at, and the AVerMedia Live Gamer Mini (at Amazon, opens in a new tab) the one for a first card. Switching between that feed and the rest of your scenes is the job a stream deck or controller takes off the keyboard, and our Stream Deck MK.2 review looks at whether the larger model earns its price.

Where the latency goes

The captured path is delayed by buffering and encoding. That is normal and it is why you play on the pass-through; whether the card is internal or external changes that delay only slightly. Recording software keeps audio aligned with the delayed video, and problems here are almost always configuration rather than hardware.

How the voice on that recording sounds is a separate question from sync. A microphone held close on a boom arm does most of the work, and the rest is the room: how acoustic treatment works explains what the reflections are doing, and treating a room cheaply covers the free fixes first.

How we chose

No cards were tested or measured here. This guide rests on published capture and pass-through specifications, connection requirements, encoding provision and driver requirements.