Best Capture Cards 2021

A capture card is a video device that takes an HDMI video feed and splits it so that it can be displayed on a monitor or TV and sent to a computer for encoding and recording. The main purpose of this is to take the processing load off of your computer or console that you want to use while streaming or recording and uploading gameplay, creative content, or other media to the internet for other people to watch. Video encoding is a processor-intensive task, so offloading this from your main device to another computer frees up performance and resources for your actual workload. Some capture cards support hardware video encoding, further reducing the load on the secondary PC, however, these normally cost a lot more.

When choosing a capture card, you need to pay attention to a few things: the maximum passthrough quality, the maximum streaming quality, and the system requirements. Passthrough quality is a measure of what resolution and framerate the capture card can pass through to your monitor, if you’re trying to play at 4K60 and your capture card can only pass through 1080p30, then you’re going to have a bad experience. Streaming quality is a measure of video quality that the capture card can encode for streaming or recording purposes, some cards can pass through a high resolution but have to downscale the video stream as they lack the required performance. All of these devices need to be or can be connected to a computer to actually record or stream to the internet, for this purpose they also have system requirements. Remember that it’s the computer’s CPU that will likely be doing most of the encoding work so make sure it’s a good one.

To help you pick a solid option we’ve drawn up a list of our recommendations for the best capture cards in 2021.

The Elgato HD60 S+ is one of the few capture cards on the market that supports HDR, specifically HDR10 which makes this a great option for any HDR gamers. With lag-free 4k60 HDR passthrough, you can experience your gameplay in all but high framerate 4K while streaming in 1080p60 with HDR or at 4K30.

It’s a little disappointing that the 4K30 stream doesn’t support HDR but it’s great that the 1080p60 option does. It’s also disappointing that there’s no option for 4k60 streaming, unfortunately, you will have to pay more for that. One thing to note for users using a Mac as the streaming device, streaming HDR is only supported on Windows.

The Elgato 4K60 Pro is currently the ultimate capture card as it supports both 4K60 HDR passthrough and recording. For users who prefer to play and stream at higher refresh rates it even supports 1440p144Hz and 1080p240Hz passthrough and recording. Amazingly, this only ends up costing less than $40 more than the HD60 S+ above.

The only downsides for this capture card, and yes we’re nit-picking here, are the lack of hardware encoder, the lack of support for passthrough or recording of high refresh-rate 4K video, and the requirement of the 4x PCIe slot and 4 PCIe lanes. The hardware encoder would almost double the price as you’ll see below, and there are currently no high refresh-rate 4K options so these are both perfectly reasonable. We would prefer to have seen this use a high-speed USB connection though as using 4 PCIe lanes means you either can’t have a PCIe SSD or have to limit your graphics card to 8 lanes rather than 16. Finally, it only works on Windows 10, there is no Mac support.

The Razer Ripsaw HD supports 4K60 passthrough and 1080p60 streaming just like the HD60 S+ at the top of the list. Unlike the HD60 S+, however, it doesn’t support HDR, which may be a problem for some, but if you’re not using HDR anyway you can save yourself a few bucks by picking the Ripsaw instead.

The Ripsaw features a 3.5mm audio-in jack that lets you seamlessly insert commentary over your streamed footage. Some users have reported audio playback issues when connecting to their computer’s audio which may require you to use the integrated audio out jack. Some users have also reported that the Ripsaw only recognised USB 3.1 ports rather than 3.0.

The Elgato 4K60 S+ is the USB version of the 4K60 Pro and it comes with the same passthrough and streaming statistics. There are a few differences however. Using USB means it doesn’t take up any PCIe lanes which is great. This model doesn’t support high refresh rate streaming at all but can support high refresh-rate passthrough.

The biggest difference, however, is the inclusion of a hardware encoder. This enables the 4K60 S+ to record video in a standalone function without a streaming PC. For this, it requires a V30/UHS-3 SD card to be able to handle up to 7 hours of 4K HDR video on a 256GB card. The encoder also takes the load off the streaming PC. Unfortunately it also basically doubles the price, so unless you need the standalone functionality, or really don’t want to use a second PC, you might be better of sticking with the Pro model.

The Avermedia Live Gamer Duo’s unique selling point is its dual input support allowing you to stream two content sources to one PC. This is great if you want to connect a DSLR camera up as a webcam. Unfortunately, the second input is limited to 1080p60 and doesn’t support HDR.

The card can passthrough 4K60 HDR, 1440p144, and 1080p240, however, it can only stream at 1080p60 HDR which is a little disappointing given that it costs about the same as the 4K60 Pro. As a plus side for fans of RGB, the side of the Live Gamer Duo is well lit.

Those were our recommendations for the best capture cards in 2021. Have you bought a capture card recently? Which model did you pick and what was your experience?