HAVE YOU BEEN WANTING TO UPGRADE TO THE BLEEDING EDGE WITH 4K 60FPS GAMING AND CAPTURE?
FINALLY, AN AFFORDABLE AND REASONABLE SOLUTION HITS THE MARKET, DELIVERING KICKASS PERFORMANCE,
WIDE COMPATIBILITY, A SLICK DESIGN, ALL WHILE REMAINING THE CHEAPEST SOLUTION CURRENTLY
AVAILABLE.
THE ELGATO 4K60 PRO
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun today covering Elgato’s latest
capture solution - the 4K60 Pro which is shipping…
now!
This is a PCIe 4x capture card for your desktop that allows you to bring in your 4K60 signals
or even lower-resolution high-refresh video feeds from a PC and capture, stream, and pass
them through!
As with a lot of things Elgato has launched recently, I’ve seen some backlash to the
price.
$400 puts the 4K60 Pro at the CHEAPEST available 4K60 CAPTURE solution on the market.
Most PCIe (which tend to be more stable than USB devices) cost at least DOUBLE the price.
Magewell does now offer a USB 4K60 capture solution for around $450 which I will be reviewing
shortly, as well.
But $400 is quite literally a revolutionary price point for such a device, there is no
room to complain about it.
If it’s too much for you, you likely have no real need for 4K capture anyway.
So here’s the card.
It’s big, it’s beautiful.
I love the shroud, I love the LED for that extra case bling.
I love that the inputs and outputs are labeled right-side-up, which has been a problem of
capture cards for me - I keep getting them labeled upside down somehow.
Again, it’s a PCIe 4X card, meaning most users will just need to put it in a full 16x
slot like your graphics card goes in.
For this, they’ve actually included the clip to go into your 16x lock at the end of
the card.
This isn’t necessary, and could cause problems for those actually trying to use it with 4x
slots, however.
You need high-end hardware for this.
Their specs page lists requirements of 6th Gen Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs, and
10-series Nvidia graphics or the new Vega graphics line.
I did all of my console recording testing on my main Zezima build with an Intel Core
i7-6900k and a Nvidia GTX 1080, but I also did dual PC setup testing with a build containing
an Intel Core i9-7980XE and a Nvidia GTX 980.
Yes, I said 980.
10-series Nvidia graphics is the best, most-likely-to-work recommendation, but the top-end second-gen
Maxwell graphics cards will handle 4K60 just fine.
So if you have a 980 or 980ti, don’t freak out - you can use this.
And yes, Windows 10 is still required.
BUT they’ve done great work at improving how the card works with your PC, and are going
to keep working on it.
The 4K60 Pro uses DirectShow drivers, which are generally more compatible and stable than
how they previously did things.
They’ve also developed a dedicated “4K Capture Utility” program for the card.
The old software was originally JUST developed with the base Game Capture HD in mind and
modded for new features.
It’s gotten to a much better place in recent revisions, but I’m glad to see them making
a new one.
It’s fairly spartan on the capture tab at the moment - even lacking audio level indicators
- but the library tab is definitely improved.
I have also been told that the team is working to add in features that you might be missing
from the original Game Capture software, so those will come in time.
They just want to make sure performance stays the top priority.
Alternatively if you DO want to use their software and the Stream Command, Flashback
Recording, streaming capabilities, and so on - you can actually use the 4K60 Pro with
the Game Capture software, just limited to 1080p 60fps instead of the full 4K.
The full 4K setup in their software tries to utilize the available hardware-accelerated
encoding to make sure 4K 60FPS capture happens without performance hits.
So with Nvidia cards it will use Nvenc, AMD Vega can use VCE, and if you have QuickSync
and a decent GPU, Intel Quick Sync can be used, though that last one isn’t an ideal
situation and is capped at 4k30.
You can also kick it into “Software (Built-In)” mode which just uses X264, but that will take
a LOT of CPU horsepower.
On my 6900K.
It was using more than 50% CPU across all cores to records 4K60 in Software mode.
Crazy.
The AMD RX 500 series can use VCE with the 4k60 Pro, too, but capped at 4k30.
You also get to customize the resolution of your recorded video from 2160p60 down to 720p30
to get exactly what you want.
So if you want to just play in 4K and record 1080p, you can do that.
OR, which I found out while testing it with my base PS4 before my PS4 Pro showed up, you
can have it upscale 1080p60 sources to 4K.
Now, there is NOT a hardware scaler built-in to the 4k60 pro like options from Magewell.
BUT since it’s utilizing hardware encoding - Nvenc in my case - the encoding chip on
the GPU handles all of that with no performance impact.
I posted a sample recording of upscaling 1080p60 base PS4 footage to 4K in the software and
it’s hard to tell the difference.
The software records up to about 140 megabits per second, regardless of resolution, so there’s
plenty of bandwidth to work with.
You can, of course, still pull much higher bitrate signals from the card through third
party software like OBS Studio, too.
With console recording, I ran into zero performance issues, and the quality is outstanding.
There is a significant delay in the footage and audio showing up on the preview compared
to your actual game screen in THEIR software, but in OBS Studio it was very low-latency.
With PC recording…
well - single-PC 4k60 recording will still be an issue, at least in my experience.
At full 4K60 in demanding games, there just doesn’t seem to be enough bandwidth from
the GPU and Nvenc chip in my cases to get a good recording going.
I’ve had nothing but trouble using OBS Game Capture for full 4K60 games, and similar performance
issues happen with this card.
BUT it’s a capture card.
Throw it in a secondary rig and then you have no performance issues at all.
Now at 4k60, you will still have screen tearing without VSync.
There’s not really a fix for that.
Tearing happens on your screen, it’s going to happen in your capture.
BUT this card also supports up to 144hz at 1080p and 1440p.
So your high refresh rate monitors can be used without the INSANE screen tearing issues
of trying to clone to a 60hz capture card.
The card does not CAPTURE higher than 60 frames per second, but it reads them in a way that
screen tearing is MUCH less of an issue - just like it’s not an issue on high refresh monitors
in the first place.
The frames are on screen for so short amounts of time that you don’t have time to notice
any potential tearing.
There’s a couple neat shortcuts for the software I can tell you about.
On the main screen, hitting CTRL ALT SHIFT D will review a more verbose view of input
and recording stats, just in case you want to keep an eye on your frame rates.
Also to save on performance, in the settings you can enable “lower resolution on recording”
which will drop your preview resolution while recording.
Last bit of info from the software - they also provide some EDID selection tools which
make the setup process for PC and the like a LOT easier.
“EDID” is the device ID of displays connected to your graphics card - how it picks up supported
formats.
You can choose for your output to read the EDID of the 4K60 Pro itself, to pass through
your connected monitor’s EDID via the HDMI out on the 4k60, or to merge them together.
For PC connectivity, having the internal EDID is great because it can maintain a clone or
device selection without needing to re-adjust the clone every time you set it up.
BUT in my experience it doesn’t show beyond 120hz as available in my Nvidia control panel.
But I don’t actually have 144hz monitors hooked up, so maybe it’s better when you
already have 144hz going.
If you’re using the passthrough, you can set it to the monitor EDID and it will let
your graphics card detect whatever formats your monitor supports.
The quality, of course, is amazing.
I have not noticed any flaws, artifacting, or anything like that.
At a high bitrate, even on YouTube’s messy compression, 4k60 looks phenomenal.
Of course, no one expects you to be streaming 4k60 content.
That would require a ridiculously fast internet connection and either YouTube or a custom
streaming CDN.
I also wanted to note something specific to my setup.
My main PC monitor is actually a 17:9 resolution, instead of 16:9.
It’s 4096 by 2160, also known as DCI 4K.
This card supports that format, but mainly only in OBS or third-party apps.
In their software, it forces the recording to 16:9 and would need stretched back out
to look correct.
Most people aren’t using this format, but it is an option.
So that’s it - the Elgato 4K60 Pro.
2160p 60fps gaming is quickly becoming the high-end standard now that both the PS4 Pro
and Xbox One X are on the market, and 4K monitors have really come down in price.
For this review, I actually had to change my main setup to a triple 4K monitor setup,
which was not what I had planned on.
My two main screens - my LG DCI 4K production monitor and my crappy Monoprice 4K screen
from 2015 both only support HDMI 1.4, which doesn’t allow for 4K60 video feeds over
HDMI.
They’re connected via DisplayPort to my PC.
So in order to play something like the PS4 Pro I bought at 4K, I needed a HDMI 2.0 compatible
display.
I got this lovely LG 27UD68 for $350 open box from B&H, it’s a full 10-bit IPS display.
There are cheaper TN panel and even IPS options for similar prices out there.
I’ll have some linked below.
I have two other 4K capture card reviews coming in the next couple months, so stay tuned for
those.
I just got back from IEM Oakland 2017 with Intel and need some recovery time, but I can’t
wait to get these reviews out and justify my PS4 Pro and monitor purchase, haha.
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