It would be interesting to see if Magwell would agree.
Part of the problem with testing any streaming results is that the hardwares results are as dependent on the softwares ability to use it correctly as much as the actual quality of the hardware. an example of this is adobe CC5 through CC6 and select output and capture cards just would not work together well regardless of the drivers used for a good 1.5 years because Adobe just did not want to deal with it. and for instance Xsplit is definitely in that category of not their priority to work with most things well as their parent company is a maker of Streaming Hardware.
I agree on the software side of things, totally dependent, but OBS is a broadly used software, in in most cases both Magewell/ELGato know that it will be used on it, tbh i seen reviews of other products of each company working great on OBS, i think its a very fair place to test them both. The price difference is more than twice but the bandwidth is more than double and the color subsampling might make it worth it.
There’s a myth that you can’t get a capture card to do 4K 60 for a low price… but you need to think outside the box…
Use a Decklink Duo 2, feed it the 4 quadrants of a 4K60 image, then combine all 4 in OBS, with render delay filters to line up all 4 quadrants properly… Then use something like FFV1 to record uncompressed to RAID-0 NVMes on Threadripper. (BTW, this solution, unlike Elgato, is 100% Linux compatible)
Decimator Design have proven themselves to provide cheap high quality converters, so they may be the one to look for when it comes to HDMI 2.0 to 4X SDI.
Just to clarify, the CARD is cheap, but the converter brings the combined cost up. I would have recommended the Shogun Inferno, (Digital Foundry uses that for capture) but that only has 1 single 12G-SDI (likely 4:1 compressed) output. You want to avoid 12G-SDI from Blackmagic and Atomos cause it’s actually 4:1 compressed 4K 60 using a FPGA IP over SDI coax. This is why the 12G capture is so expensive, cause they need to include the IP logic on bigger FPGAs.
I posted this at YouTube and thought your forum would be a great place to put it as well.
I use vMix production software all the time for my videos, I call it the Swiss Army Knife of Computer Video Production. I bring this up because they tested the Yuan 4k Cards a while ago and they worked in all their systems. Yuan have several cards that do 4k including a few that do Single 4k 60p. I like the Quad 4k 30p card as the best value for the $$$ card on the market. I guess I should say the pricing, $490 MSRP for the single channel 60p and $699 MSRP for the Quad channel 4k 30p. The comparability page makes it seem like it would work in your older capture system since it lists these OS’s - Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7 - Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 - Linux 2.6.14 or Higher ( 32-bit and 64-bit ) - Link to Yuan page - http://www.yuan.com.tw/products/capture/capture_pcie.htm
