Performance

From my testing, the performance of the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 is identical to the external AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 GC553G2 Capture Box. They're based on the same hardware, and only use a different interface to communicate with the PC. Although it has a wider data pipeline at its disposal (32 Gbps vs 10 Gbps), the PCI Express variant of the capture card offers no additional passthrough or recording resolutions and/or refresh rates. AVerMedia sees the Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 simply as an "internal" alternative to the GC553G2 Capture Box – basically a solution for those whose computers aren't equipped with 10 Gbps USB-C ports, but still want to enjoy the benefits of a true HDMI 2.1 capture card.

The AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 can be used to capture video from any device with a HDMI output. The general idea is to connect the HDMI output of your source, such as your PC or console, to the card's HDMI input, and then connect the card's HDMI output to your monitor's or TV's HDMI input.

The beauty of having HDMI 2.1 ports on both the HDMI input and output side of the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 is that you can stream and record video in 4K resolution at 60 FPS, and simultaneously pass it through to your monitor or TV in 4K resolution at 120 or 144 Hz, with HDR and VRR included. In 1440p, the Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 is capable of 120, 144, and 240 Hz passthrough, again with HDR and VRR included. In 1080p, the passthrough refresh rate is bumped up to 360 Hz. As for the 3440x1440 ultrawide resolution, here the passthrough refresh rate goes up to 120 Hz.




The HDMI passthrough latency at 1440p@144, which is the resolution and refresh rate I used for this test, is lower than 0.5 ms, which is more or less impossible to detect in practice. That's great news for game streamers, as they don't have to worry about losing performance while capturing content. The entire experience was equally excellent on the LG C1 OLED TV (4K120) and the Gigabyte M32U monitor (4K144).

The only areas where you could run into issues are 1440p monitors with refresh rates higher than 144 Hz, and ultrawide (3440x1440) monitors with refresh rates above 120 Hz. While the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 supports 240 Hz passthrough at 1440p, many such monitors are limited to a HDMI 2.0 input, which is capped at 144 Hz at 1440p.

As for the video capture capabilities of the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575, it will happily capture 4K60, 1440p120, and 1080p120 video. If you want to capture content in HDR, you're limited to 4K30, 1440p60, or lower.

Supported encoding formats are NV12 with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling at 4K60, as well as YUY2 (4:2:2) and P010 at 4K30. For 1440p60, 1080p120, and below we get uncompressed 4:4:4 RGB24, YUY2, and P010 encoding.

To demonstrate the performance of the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 capture card, I captured a bit of gameplay from my PC. Take a look at the following video montage of the clips I recorded. Do keep in mind that YouTube butchered the quality of recorded footage to some extent. Still, since the stuff recorded by this capture card will regularly end up on YouTube anyway, the video provides a relevant demonstration of AVerMedia's capture card's real-life performance.


The overall performance of the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K 2.1 GC575 capture card is outstanding. The colors of the recording look vibrant, and there are no apparent motion or compression artifacts, or pixelization. Anything that might look off in my example video is added by YouTube's compression algorithm, and not the capture card itself. I had similarly great results in other supported capture resolutions and framerates, with absolutely no passthrough-related issues at all. AVerMedia has created a great-performing PCI Express capture card. It has proven to be very reliable in my testing, which is just as if not more important than the picture quality.