Even if you're a streamer or not actively capturing, the lag-free passthrough is important, and for PC gamers getting up to 240 FPS passthrough and capture is a win. The Live Gamer Bolt is well suited for the next generation consoles where we expect 4K60 to be the norm. If you're streaming, then you're not going to be bothered by this, but for other content creation, as long as you have the storage you'll have some truly incredible looking footage to build your videos from. Each of these 5-minute clips came out just shy of 4GB each, and that'll be higher still if you're pushing the bitrate to the outer reaches of what's possible. One thing to remember is that these files are huge. I've embedded a couple of samples below taken at 4K60 on the Xbox One X in Forza 7, one with HDR on and one without (if you don't have an HDR display you'll get an SDR copy instead), both recorded at the maximum bitrate allowed on my PC of 100mbps in h.264 using the AVerMedia RECentral application. So how good does the video look? I wish I could show you the RAW files without any form of online compression because the footage looks insane. Running a capture at the maximum settings I was allowed on my PC, I observed no noticeable impact on either CPU or GPU load and as soon as the recording is stopped the file is right there, ready to go. The Live Gamer Bolt relies on GPU encoding which means you'll see virtually no degradation in your system performance while using it. The effect on your PC is also, well, virtually non-existent. There's an HDMI 2.0 input and output, the Thunderbolt 3 connection and a line-in jack if you need to use it for something such as party chat. You can feel a slight warmth around the edges after longer sessions, but nothing even as hot as your phone would get after some intense gaming.Īll the ports are located on one side, making it neat and easy to implement into your setup without having to worry about cables flapping about everywhere. And it seems to do a tremendous job keeping everything cool. Inside there's a cooling fan, it's fairly quiet, but you can certainly feel it if you place your hand over the top. The actual physical unit is incredibly simple, albeit loaded up to the gills with RGB but also thoughtfully designed. What it does is deliver all of that without breaking a sweat. That part is system dependent though, and on my PC I was only given the option of 100mbps as a maximum. It delivers uncompressed video, with a choice of h.264 or h.265 at a maximum bitrate of 240mbps. The Live Gamer Bolt tops out at 4K resolution at 60 FPS with or without HDR. OK it's not zero, but at 50ms it's so close you'll never, ever notice it. The magic of using Thunderbolt 3 is that insane performance and essentially zero latency. But it does make it a perfect mobile solution for folks using a number of current and future gaming laptops. Without Thunderbolt 3 it won't even power on. Unless, like I am, you're using one of only two current AMD-based motherboards you won't be able to use this capture card at all. On one hand, it's going to be one of the main barriers to entry for a number of people, especially those using AMD Ryzen systems. That's where the Thunderbolt 3 connection comes into play on the Live Gamer Bolt. Thunderbolt 3 delivers the performance but it'll also stop some from using it at all. Internal capture cards hit the magic 4K60 first because it's just easier when you don't have a USB cable to act as a bottleneck. On the face of it that might not sound that impressive, after all, we're two years on and it performs the same as something much older?īut this isn't an internal capture card for one, so the benefits of using a PCIe x4 connection aren't there. In virtually every way, the Live Gamer Bolt is as impressive as the Live Gamer 4K, a capture card I've recommended to all and been using myself for the past couple of years. Source: Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Windows Central)
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