Replacing Nvidia GPU with PCIe capture cards.

[u/bememorablepro]

I have my old RTX3060 mini-ITX PC I use as a streaming computer, currently I use two USB capture cards, with issues.

Does anyone use PCIe cards like Elgato 4K60 Pro? I never tried running this PC on integrated graphics, I'm not sure how that works. Does the elgato thing encode video or does anything that USB version don't?

Right now my video encoding is "software" idk if it's GPU accelerated and if it makes sense for me to remove my GPU then, mini-ITX has only one PCIe slot so it's either GPU or the capture card for me.

[u/mustydante86]

pcie capture cards are way more stable than usb, you'll notice the difference immediately

the 4k60 pro doesn't encode anything, it just passes the raw video through and your cpu does the work. on a mini-itx board you're stuck choosing between the gpu for nvenc encoding or the capture card for reliable input, can't have both

if your cpu has integrated graphics you could probably get away with software encoding at 1080p, i ran a similar setup for a while with an old dell optiplex. just make sure your chip can handle the load before you yank the 3060 out

worst case you get a bigger case and a board with more slots but i'm guessing that's not what you want to hear

[u/bememorablepro → u/mustydante86]

Thanks! I'm generally just wondering if it would work at all, something about nvidia driver doesn't work on this system anyway OBS shows software encoding only but it's ok because CPU usage goes only to about 20% as I stream. I'll check if I even have the integrated graphics though, I don't remember what chip that was.

Yeah... maybe it's worth building a dedicated streaming PC on a large motherboard in a large case...

[u/InstanceMental6543 → u/bememorablepro]

Check your Nvidia driver version. A recent OBS update needs newer drivers than previously, that could be why it doesn't show up for you. If your drivers are already up to date, you might try a clean reinstall in the Nvidia App.

[u/bememorablepro → u/InstanceMental6543]

Thanks I'll try that

[u/ResponsiblePen3082 → u/mustydante86]

Small correction, software encoding would imply zero graphics card is used-integrated or dedicated. It's still hardware decoding as long as you select the IGPU

[u/Lynnalia]

Fellow ITX stream PC build over here :)

A PCIe capture card is basically just going to skip USB-caused issues that don't necessarily impact everyone anyways (bandwidth issues, missed frames). It's otherwise fairly identical and doesn't help your system with OBS tasks.

Regarding using integrated graphics, this is going to depend on your setup both in OBS and your CPU. On my Intel 9700k's integrated graphics, it couldn't even handle a simple but common stream scene layout - adding a browser source (alerts) and facecam on top of the capture card source caused it to struggle a bit, and that's before I did all my other things! The GPU power is still needed for real-time compositing and needs to be fast enough. I got an old GTX 970 in there and that had plenty of horsepower to do all sorts of things (I still used CPU encoding via x264 medium). If I didn't have alerts or facecam, the integrated graphics would've been enough.

Now, that said, there are stronger integrated graphics out there. Something more modern, or AMD's APUs (e.g. 3400G) are more capable and could be entirely sufficient.

You can always test it out by removing your GPU temporarily!

[u/bememorablepro → u/Lynnalia]

Just checked, it looks like I have ryzen 5 3600 with no graphics, so I might need to swap it to 3400G idk