Best Capture Cards for PS5

A 1080p60 cap reads like a compromise until you count what a stream actually carries. Twitch and YouTube hand viewers 1080p60 at most, so a card that captures exactly that is not leaving anything on the table. This one does it for less than almost anything else here, with a 4K input and loop-out so the console still feeds your television at full resolution while the capture runs alongside.

What we did not expect at this price is how little it feels like a budget part: an aluminum case, a braided cable, and both USB-A and USB-C connections so a laptop without full-size ports does not need an adapter. Setup is as short as it gets, with no driver and no software, straight into OBS as a webcam source, and the YUY2 output keeps the picture clean without a trip through the settings menus.

The ceiling is stated plainly: 1080p60 capture and a loop-out that passes 4K at 60Hz rather than anything faster. If you want a 4K archive of a playthrough, this is not the card and the Elgato is. For going live, which is why most people buy one of these, the extra money buys very little that a viewer would ever see.

Between the budget dongles and the two Elgatos there is a gap, and the Cyber4K fills it with a spec sheet borrowed from the expensive end: 4K60 capture, 4K60 passthrough, and 1440p144 or 1080p240 for high-refresh play.

Those numbers come with the boring details done right, which is what makes us comfortable with a name you may not know. UVC and UAC compliance means no drivers, the connection is USB-C into a 5Gbps port, there are separate line-in and headset jacks, and the warranty runs two years. At 126 grams it is light enough to hang off a laptop lid without dragging the cable out of the port.

The catch is the format ladder. The top of it, meaning 4K60, 1440p144 and 1080p240, is MJPEG, which is fine for a live stream and heavy for an archive: big files and a slightly softer frame than an uncompressed capture. Push for uncompressed and you are working lower down, around 1440p or 1080p. For a PS5 owner who wants 4K60 in the can without Elgato money, that is a fair trade, and a fast drive makes it a comfortable one.

The 4K Pro is the only card here that goes inside the computer, and most of what is good about it follows from that. Nothing on the desk. No USB bandwidth shared with a keyboard, mouse and webcam. No cable running across the floor to a laptop.

What it does for the PS5 is the part that matters: HDMI 2.1 in and out with 8K60 passthrough, so the television keeps everything the console sends, including 4K120, VRR and HDR, while the card records 4K60 HDR10 to the PC. High-frame-rate capture reaches 1080p240. If a capture card has ever quietly downgraded your display mode, you will understand why the passthrough spec is the first one to read.

We think it is the right card for a desktop that already lives next to the TV. The install is a PCIe slot and a driver, and after that the card behaves like part of the machine rather than a peripheral. Dual-PC streaming works, and it is the tidiest way to run one box for play and another for the broadcast.

One caution. It deserves a trial run: black-screen output and periodic stutter are the faults to watch for, so test capture and passthrough while returning it is still easy. Beyond that it simply works, quietly, from inside the case.

For a first capture setup, the Dcyfol does the two things that matter and skips the rest: it records 1080p60 with no drivers, and its loop-out previews 4K so the television is not downgraded just because a capture card is in the chain. That pairing suits anyone testing whether streaming is for them, because the cost of finding out is small and the picture is good enough to publish.

The box itself is tiny, about an inch square and under three inches long, and the bundle covers the awkward cases: an HDMI extension, a USB extension, and a USB-C adapter for a laptop with small ports only. In OBS it appears as a webcam source, which is the least dramatic way to start streaming and, we think, the right one.

Audio is the part to be ready for. Budget cards in this class tend to need a sync offset before the game sound and the picture line up, and one test recording settles it: clap on camera, see where the sound lands, set the offset in OBS, then forget about it. Everything else here is honest, with sharp 1080p60, low heat, and no surprises once it is running.

If your PS5 is plugged into a 120Hz television, the interesting number on this card is not the capture resolution. It is the passthrough. The CCD10 sends 4K60, 1440p120 or 1080p240 to your screen, so a fast game still reaches your eyes at the refresh rate you paid for while the capture runs alongside.

Capture itself is 1080p60 over USB-C 3.0, and the audio side is thought through better than most: a 3-pole mic input for a standalone microphone, and a 4-pole TRRS jack that takes a headset mic and sends game audio back to your ears. If you stream with a headset rather than a desk mic, that second port is the one you will use every session.

The passthrough is the confident half of the spec sheet. The capture is where the claims can outrun what you see, with soft images at 1080p and frame rates below what you would expect showing up as the risks. Those faults surface fastest in a fast-moving game, so test with one in the first week rather than a slow menu.

That is why it sits below the Elgato and the Cyber4K here, and why it still earns a place. For a 120Hz television, a headset, and a stream that goes out at 1080p60 regardless, the passthrough and the audio jacks are what you notice every session, and the capture is the part you tolerate rather than the part you bought.

Four audio ports on a capture card this small is unusual. The Guermok gives you mic in, audio in, a headphone jack and a speaker output, which turns a budget dongle into the center of a small streaming desk: mic on one port, game audio monitored on another, no mixer in between.

Capture runs at 1080p60, or 2K at 30fps if you prefer resolution to frame rate, and the loop-out handles 4K60 so the television keeps its signal. At 66 grams and about four inches long it disappears behind a laptop, and setup is UVC and UAC, so OBS finds it without a driver install.

What we like is how little the audio routing costs you. Plugging headphones into the card lets you hear the game before it goes through OBS, which is the difference between monitoring a stream and guessing at it, and the separate mic input means commentary does not have to share a channel with anything else. It is a card for a headset streamer on a tight budget, and it does not pretend to be more than that.