ADAPTIVE SYNC SCREEN RECORDER! Avermedia GC551G2 HDMI Capture Card Review

Capture cards in the PC space aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be – the significant improvements to OBS and graphics card encoders has meant for anyone wanting to record their system or stream they no longer need a second system or a capture card. The console gamers among us though still benefit greatly from an HDMI capture card, which is where Avermedia comes in. This is their new GC551G2, and it has one major new feature – adaptive sync support. This is great, as it means you now shouldn’t have any tearing on screen while streaming your console games. Of course if you’d rather run a 2 PC streaming setup anyway it works just fine for that too.

Let me run you through the specs, this will happily pass through up to 4K60, 1440p120 or 1080p120, alongside HDR and variable refresh rate. It will record at a maximum of 4K30, 1440p60 or 1080p60 and shows up as a standard driverless UVC device, so will work in any program as a webcam/video input device. I/O wise you have two HDMI 2.0 ports, one for in and one for out, alongside a USB C port to connect to the recording system, and two 3.5mm headphone jacks for audio capture and passthrough too.

One of the main things to actively test with any capture card solution is the latency. Especially for a passthrough device like this, if this adds any latency to what you see on your screen is going to be detrimental to your gaming experience. Happily, through testing with NVIDIA’s LDAT I can safely say this adds no latency. In fact, in my very, very confusing testing I found this had slightly lower latency than an otherwise identical setup but with the GC551G2 removed. Weird, I know!

The other thing to check is the capture latency, how long it takes to get an image into something like OBS. This will always take a little longer, especially because you are normally viewing OBS on a separate display which itself has input lag, but I’m happy to say this is decently fast. I measured around 35ms between an action on the primary display and the same action being displayed in OBS on a second screen. While you still wouldn’t want to play via the recording directly, it’s definitely in the “low latency” category.

As for this thing’s key feature, variable refresh rate support, that’s where things get messy. The first thing you should know is that you have to turn VSYNC on in all your games. That isn’t optional, because this tear-y mess is what you get if you don’t – regardless of variable refresh rate support. This is mostly thanks to CSGO running at much higher than the 120Hz target refresh rate, although I should note that this isn’t what I was seeing while playing. I had no visual issues, it was only the recording that had the horrific tearing.

Speaking of recording issues, one of the troubles with recording an adaptive sync signal is that, well, it’s adaptive. It’s variable. The trouble with that is the capture can’t be variable – it has to sample frames at a consistent rate, either every 16.67ms for 60 FPS or every 33.33ms for 30 FPS, so if the game draws three frames in that time, then two next time, you’ll have that sort of stuttering or frame pacing problem I’ve seen in the clips. This is somewhat an inherent issue with trying to capture adaptive sync gameplay, and it’s an issue that the other adaptive sync capable capture cards suffer from too.

Besides the recording smoothness, I did also experience a few frame jumps on-screen too. It felt a little off, but with some of the larger movements I tried to do it made it rather clear that some of the stuttering and hitching was making its way through the unit to my monitor. It didn’t happen often so I can’t give any obvious steps to reproduce it, but it was a bit of a pain at times.

As for the pricing, Avermedia have listed this at £160 on Amazon as of launch, although they’ve given me a non-sponsored voucher code for an extra £20 off – I’ll leave that in the description if you fancy using it alongside a global Amazon affiliate link to the capture card. I believe it’ll only work in the UK though, and it’s only valid until the end of August so it seems they want you to act fast. For some context, Elgato’s new HD60 X which also supports adaptive sync comes in at £190 and EVGA’s XR1 Pro comes in at £200, so at £160 this is priced pretty well, and £140 makes it even better. If you are after a capture card for recording or streaming from your console, and want the adaptive sync support, this might be a good shout. It is a shame it’s limited to HDMI 2.0, and I’m hopeful that through firmware updates they can smooth out the capture process a little more, but on the whole I don’t think it’s too bad.