Performance

The capture and pass-through performance of the AVerMedia Live Streamer Ultra HD GC571 within all supported resolutions is excellent. This is one of those products that does what it promises without any weird hick-ups or issues. If you skipped the introduction and went straight to the performance section of this review, it's worth mentioning that the Live Streamer Ultra HD GC571 can do 4K30, 1440p60, and 1080p120 video capture, simultaneously doing 4K60, 1440p144, or 1080p240 pass-through, while maintaining both VRR and HDR support. If you're using an ultrawide (21:9) monitor with a 3440x1440 native resolution, the maximum pass-through refresh rate is limited to 100 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.

Supported encoding formats are NV12 with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling at 4K30, 1440p60 and 1080p120, and we get uncompressed 4:4:4 NV12, XRGB, YUY2 and P010 encoding at 1440p30 and 1080p60.

To demonstrate the performance of the AVerMedia Live Streamer Ultra HD GC571 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 Streamer Ultra HD GC571 capture card is great. 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 pass-through-related issues at all. AVerMedia created a great-performing PCI Express capture card. It has proven very reliable in my testing, which is just as, if not more important than the picture quality.