PS5 Capture Card 2026: 4K60 Record, 4K144 Passthrough

Let us begin with the bad news, because it is also the useful news: there is no such thing as a PS5 capture card. There are capture cards, and there is a PS5, and the two are joined by an HDMI cable about which neither device has strong feelings. A capture card does not know it is looking at a PlayStation. It sees a resolution, a refresh rate, an HDR flag, and a copy-protection flag, and it digitizes whatever it is permitted to digitize. Every time a vendor tells you a card is for the PS5, that is marketing shorthand for one boring engineering fact: the card's passthrough can survive what a PS5 emits without choking.

This tutorial builds a working 4K60 capture chain from a real PS5 to a real PC running OBS Studio, with the numbers checked and the fluff peeled off. You will learn which 2026 cards actually exist (and one very popular one that does not), why disabling HDCP will kill Netflix, why the box advertised as capturing 4K at 144 FPS will hand you 4K60 in practice, and how to tell — from the OBS status bar and a sixty-second test file — whether your rig is genuinely working or merely appears to be. It is long because the topic is full of small lies, and each one costs an afternoon.

No Such Thing as a PS5 Card

The phrase gets typed into search bars ten thousand times a day, and it describes a product category that does not exist. Understanding why it does not exist is the fastest way to buy the right hardware, because it tells you exactly which spec to look at and which to ignore.

The card cannot see the console

A capture card is a video digitizer with a passthrough tap. As AVerMedia's own primer on how capture cards work puts it, the device converts video and audio from an external source into a digital format a computer can process. The source could be a PS5, a Nintendo Switch 2, a DSLR, a mixing desk, or a 1998 Dreamcast through an HDMI upscaler. The silicon does not care. It negotiates an HDMI link, reads the timing, checks whether the stream is HDCP-protected, and — if it is allowed — hands the pixels to your PC over USB or PCIe.

This is why a "best capture card for PS5" list and a "best capture card for Xbox Series X" list are, on inspection, the same list in a different order. What actually varies between consoles is the output envelope: a base PS5 can push up to 4K120 and 8K on paper, a Series X the same, a Switch 2 tops out lower. The card you want is simply one whose passthrough tolerates your console's maximum output so your gameplay looks normal on your TV, and whose capture path grabs the resolution and framerate you actually intend to record or stream.

Two categories, internal and external

There are exactly two kinds, and AVerMedia's documentation splits them the same way everyone else does. Internal capture cards install into a PCIe slot inside a desktop, which buys you lower latency and no USB bandwidth ceiling at the cost of a spare slot and a screwdriver. External capture cards are plug-and-play boxes that connect over USB or Thunderbolt, which buys you portability and laptop compatibility at the cost of being throttled by whatever USB controller you plug into. That is the entire taxonomy. Everything else — HDR, VRR, onboard encoding, a headphone jack for party chat — is a feature bolted onto one of those two chassis.

The GC553Pro that was never manufactured

Here is a small public service. You will see the "AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra S GC553Pro" cited as a top pick in tier-list videos and even in auto-generated "best of" summaries. There is no such product. The model number is fabricated, and the fact that a machine-written blurb repeats it does not conjure it into existence. The real card is the AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1, part number GC553G2 — HDMI 2.1, 4K60 capture, 4K144 passthrough, and an MSRP of $299.99. When you go shopping, search the part number, not the adjective soup. A phantom SKU is how you end up buying a counterfeit, or nothing at all.

Do You Even Need One?

Before you spend a cent, the responsible question: does the PS5 already do the job for free? For a large share of people who think they need a capture card, it does, and the honest tutorial says so on page one rather than page nine.

What the Create button already does

The PS5 has a hardware capture pipeline built in, triggered by the Create button on the DualSense. It records gameplay clips up to 4K, keeps a rolling background buffer you can set anywhere from the last fifteen seconds to the last sixty minutes, and grabs screenshots on demand — all encoded on-console in HEVC and dumped to internal storage or a USB drive. This is the same class of built-in capture the Xbox Series X/S and the Switch offer, and for clipping a boss kill or a funny ragdoll it is completely sufficient. No cable, no PC, no software, no HDCP fight.

When a card earns its keep

A capture card exists for the jobs the Create button cannot do. Specifically: live streaming to Twitch or YouTube through a PC, where you need the console feed inside OBS alongside a webcam, alerts, and overlays; high-fidelity archival, where you want a bitrate and framerate above what the console's internal encoder commits to; multi-source production, where a second PC handles encoding so gameplay never drops a frame; and multi-console workflows, where one pipeline ingests a PS5, a Series X, and a retro upscaler in turn. If none of those describe you, close this tab and press the Create button. You just saved $180.

The honest recommendation

If your goal is simply "get PS5 gameplay onto my computer or the internet, live," you need a card. If your goal is "send my PS5 screen to another device on my network to play remotely," you do not — that is a different feature entirely, and our walkthrough on setting up PS Remote Play at 1080p in twelve steps covers the capture-free path. Capture cards are for production. Remote Play is for playing elsewhere. People conflate them constantly and buy the wrong thing.

Prerequisites

Assemble everything below before you touch a cable. Half the "my capture card doesn't work" threads on the internet are a missing prerequisite wearing a costume.

Hardware you need

A capture card appropriate to your target resolution (the next section prices the real 2026 options). A PC or laptop with a spare USB 3.0 port or faster — the blue or teal one, ideally on a different controller than your webcam and mic. For 4K60 encoding you want a reasonably modern GPU with a hardware encoder (NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, or Intel Quick Sync), at least 16 GB of RAM, and — this one is non-negotiable at 4K — an NVMe SSD for the recording target, because a spinning disk cannot ingest a 4K60 stream without dropping frames. A television or monitor for passthrough, so you play on a real screen and not the laggy OBS preview. And storage headroom: 4K60 footage runs roughly 0.5 to 0.75 GB per minute, so a two-hour session is 60 to 90 GB.

Software and versions

Install a current OBS Studio — the 30.x or 31.x line — from the project directly, not a repackaged installer. Update your GPU drivers, because the NVENC/AMF/QSV encoder OBS calls lives in the driver, and a stale driver is a stale encoder. Manufacturer software is optional but occasionally required for a card's headline feature: AVerMedia's Streaming Center, Elgato's 4K Capture Utility, or Camera Hub. The checklist below is the minimum viable software stack.

Capture stack — minimum versions (2026)
---------------------------------------
OBS Studio            30.x or 31.x   (obsproject.com)
GPU driver            latest         (NVENC / AMF / QSV lives here)
Card firmware         latest         (via vendor utility)
Vendor utility        optional       AVerMedia Streaming Center /
                                     Elgato 4K Capture Utility
Windows               10 22H2 / 11    (UVC class driver built in)
ffmpeg                7.x            (optional, for CLI capture)

Cables, the silent killer

The single most common invisible fault in a 4K chain is a cable that cannot carry the signal. Passing 4K120 or VRR from a PS5 requires an Ultra High Speed HDMI cable rated for 48 Gbps — the one that shipped in the PS5 box qualifies, a random 4K cable from three years ago may not. You need one such cable from console to card, and a second from card to TV, because both hops carry the full-rate signal. On the USB side, use the exact cable that came with the card; a charge-only USB-C cable will enumerate the device and then refuse to move 4K bandwidth, producing the maddening symptom of a card that "connects" but offers no high-resolution modes. If you own a PS5 Pro, the cabling matters even more, since its higher output envelope leans harder on HDMI 2.1 — our breakdown of the PS5 Pro versus the base PS5 covers what that extra GPU actually pushes down the wire.

The 2026 Lineup, Priced

What follows is the real 2026 field with real part numbers and real prices, cross-checked against GamesRadar's best-capture-card guide, PC Gamer's best-capture-card roundup, and Windows Central's individual reviews. Where the popular tier-list circuit has printed a wrong number, this table prints the right one.

The full field at a glance

The budget floor and the mid-field

At the bottom sits the $25–30 no-name USB dongle built on a MacroSilicon MS2130 or similar chip. It records an honest 1080p60 and nothing more, and for a beginner clipping to a laptop it is genuinely fine. Ignore any $28 dongle that claims 4K capture; the chip cannot do it, and the listing is lying. Above it, the useful mid-field is the true-4K30-or-clean-4K60 tier. The Asus TUF Gaming CU4K30 lands around $120 — not the $249 that circulates in some tier lists — and Windows Central called it "brilliant external video capture on a budget." It captures 4K30 (or 1440p60, or 1080p120) and passes 4K60 through, which is exactly the mid-range "1440p60 or 4K30" slot people keep describing without naming a real product.

The 4K60 sweet spot and the HDMI 2.1 top

For most PS5 streamers the sensible buy is the 4K60-capture tier. The Elgato 4K S at $159.99, launched in August 2025, captures 4K60 and passes 4K60 HDR10 — PC Gamer's verdict was that it "would be the top of the pile, if it weren't for a recent AverMedia stunner." The Elgato HD60 X at $179.99 is the reliable "no-fuss" pick GamesRadar keeps recommending, though note it captures 1080p60 (or 4K30), not 4K60. At the top, two HDMI 2.1 cards matter. The Elgato Game Capture 4K Pro is internal, $279.99, and passes an absurd 8K60 while capturing 4K60 HDR10 — GamesRadar called it "an internal capture card with some future-proofing," and Windows Central went further: "the only capture card you'll ever need (if your PC can handle it)." The AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 (GC553G2), $299.99, is the external HDMI 2.1 answer, which Windows Central summarized as "true 4K/60 FPS recording on consoles and PC, but the software needs work." That last clause is the whole card in six words. If you are also weighing which console to feed it, our PS5 versus Xbox Series X comparison lays out the output envelopes side by side.

Capture vs Passthrough

If you internalize one concept from this entire tutorial, make it this one. Nearly every confused purchase and every disappointed unboxing traces back to conflating two different numbers that a capture card advertises as if they were one.

What your eyes see versus what the file gets

Passthrough is the loop-out: the card takes the console signal and forwards a copy, effectively untouched, to your TV, so you play with normal latency on a normal screen. Capture is the encode: the card digitizes the signal and ships it to your PC over the bus, where OBS or a file receives it. These two paths have different maximum specs, and the card's box art quotes the bigger one. A GC553G2 passes 4K144 to your monitor but captures 4K60 to your PC. That is not a defect; it is physics. Passthrough is a near-lossless relay that only has to survive an HDMI hop. Capture has to compress a torrent of pixels and squeeze them through USB in real time.

HDMI 2.0 versus 2.1 and the USB ceiling

Two ceilings govern what you can capture. The first is the card's HDMI version: an HDMI 2.0 card (the 4K S, the HD60 X, the CU4K30) cannot pass or ingest 4K120 or VRR at all, so if your PS5 is set to 4K120 you will get no signal until you drop the console output. The second, and more subtle, is the USB bus. A USB 3.0 link at 5 Gbps carries roughly 4K30 to 4K60 depending on chroma subsampling; genuine high-rate 4K60 wants USB 3.2 Gen 2 at 10 Gbps or a PCIe card that sidesteps USB entirely. Plug a 10 Gbps card into a 5 Gbps port and the card obediently hides its 4K60 modes. This is why "the card connected but 4K60 isn't in the dropdown" is almost always a port or cable problem, not a broken card.

Why 4K144 recording has an asterisk

The brief that sends people shopping often reads "records up to 4K at 144 FPS." Here is the fine print the box omits. The GC553G2 can indeed produce a 4K144 file, but only through AVerMedia's own Streaming Center software on Windows, using MJPEG compression to fit the data rate — not through the standard OBS pipeline, and not on a Mac. Through OBS, over the UVC path everyone actually uses, you capture 4K60. And it barely matters: Twitch and YouTube both cap ingest at 60 fps, so a 144 fps recording exists to be scrubbed frame-by-frame in an editor, not streamed. Treat 4K144 as a passthrough-and-niche-archival number, and 4K60 as the number you will live with.

Step-by-Step Setup

Now the build. Twelve numbered steps, each with the reason it exists, because a step without a rationale is a step you will skip and then regret. This is the long-form version; if you want the condensed checklist, we keep a tighter PS5 capture card 4K60 walkthrough in twelve steps as a companion piece.

Preparing the console

1. Update the PS5 and check its video output. Go to Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output and note the current resolution and whether 120 Hz and VRR are enabled. Rationale: the console negotiates the highest mode the chain claims to support. If it is set to 4K120 and your card is HDMI 2.0, you will get a black screen and blame the card. Match the console output to the card's real capability before anything else.
2. Disable HDCP on the console. Settings > System > HDMI > Enable HDCP, toggled OFF. Rationale: HDCP is copy protection, and while it is active the card is legally and electronically forbidden from digitizing the stream, so your game capture arrives as a grey or black rectangle. Sony provides this toggle deliberately for exactly this purpose — this is not a hack, it is a switch the manufacturer hands you. Warning, and read it twice: with HDCP off, Netflix, Disney+, and Blu-ray playback will refuse to output and show a black screen, because those apps force HDCP on. Turn it back on when you want to watch films; turn it off when you want to capture games.
3. Power the console down before rewiring. Rationale: HDMI performs an HDCP and EDID handshake at link-up. Hot-plugging cables mid-handshake is the leading cause of "it worked yesterday" flakiness, mismatched resolutions, and phantom no-signal states. Build the chain cold, then boot.

Wiring the chain

4. Connect the PS5's HDMI OUT to the card's HDMI IN. Rationale: the source feeds the card. Getting IN and OUT backwards is the single most common wiring error, and it produces exactly the symptom of a totally dead setup, which sends people returning perfectly good hardware.
5. Connect the card's HDMI OUT to your TV or monitor. Rationale: this is the passthrough leg, and it is what you actually watch while playing. The OBS preview carries encode latency measured in dozens of milliseconds to a second; the passthrough monitor is near-instant. Competitive play happens on the passthrough screen, always.
6. Connect the card to the PC over USB, on the right port. Use the bundled USB-C cable into a USB 3.0-or-faster port — the blue or teal one — and, where you can choose, a port on a different controller than your webcam and audio interface. For an internal card, seat it firmly in a PCIe slot wired for at least x4. Rationale: bandwidth and contention. Two hungry USB devices sharing one controller starve each other, and starvation shows up as dropped capture frames that look like a software bug but are a topology problem.

Bringing up the software

7. Install OBS Studio and update GPU drivers, then launch. Rationale: OBS is the industry-standard front end, and the hardware encoder it will lean on ships inside your GPU driver. A current driver is a current NVENC/AMF/QSV. Do this before adding sources so the encoder list is populated correctly.
8. Add a Video Capture Device source and select the card. In OBS, Sources > add Video Capture Device, pick the card by name, and set Resolution/FPS Type to Custom with your target — 3840x2160 at 60, or 1920x1080 at 60 to start. Rationale: this is the import step where the console signal enters OBS. In Streamlabs the control has the same name. If the resolution you want is not offered, stop and revisit steps 1 and 6 — the chain is telling you it cannot carry that mode.
9. Set the color space and HDR handling. In the device properties, match the color range (Limited vs Full) to the console and decide SDR vs HDR now. Rationale: a mismatch here is what produces washed-out grey footage or a crushed, too-dark image. For a first working capture, set the PS5 to SDR and OBS to Rec.709 limited; add HDR later, deliberately, in the advanced section.
10. Configure the OBS output — encoder, rate control, container. Choose a hardware encoder (NVENC HEVC for 4K), a sensible bitrate, and a resilient container. Rationale: the software x264 encoder will pin your CPU and drop frames at 4K; hardware encoding offloads that to dedicated silicon. Details and exact values are in the next section.
11. Verify passthrough latency and audio sync. Play a few seconds on the passthrough TV, and separately watch the OBS preview to confirm audio and video are locked together in the capture. Rationale: USB capture can introduce a small, constant audio offset; catching it now is a thirty-second fix, catching it in a two-hour recording is a re-edit.
12. Record sixty seconds and inspect the file. Hit Start Recording, play for a minute with motion and sound, stop, and open the file in a player and in OBS's own log. Rationale: this is the acceptance test. You are checking for dropped frames, audio drift, correct resolution, and sane file size before you commit to a real session. The next section tells you exactly what "healthy" looks like.

Configuring OBS for 4K60

OBS defaults are tuned for 1080p streaming, not 4K console capture. Three groups of settings decide whether your 4K60 recording is clean or a stuttering mess. The full documentation lives in the OBS Studio knowledge base; what follows is the console-capture-specific subset.

Video and output resolution

Under Settings > Video, set both canvas and output resolution to your capture target and the FPS to 60. Do not downscale in this tab if you want native 4K — downscaling here throws away the resolution you paid for. If you intend to stream 1080p but archive 4K, capture at 4K and let the streaming service or a separate output handle the downscale.

# OBS — Settings > Video
Base (Canvas) Resolution:   3840x2160
Output (Scaled) Resolution: 3840x2160   # match; no downscale for native 4K
Downscale Filter:           Lanczos     # only relevant if you DO scale
Common FPS Value:           60

Encoder: hardware, not x264

Under Settings > Output, switch to Advanced mode and pick a hardware encoder. NVENC HEVC (H.265) is the right call for 4K because it halves the bitrate for equal quality versus H.264. Use CQP or a high CBR; do not starve a 4K stream with a 1080p bitrate.

# OBS — Settings > Output (Advanced) — Recording
Encoder:        NVIDIA NVENC HEVC (or AMD HW H.265 / QuickSync HEVC)
Rate Control:   CQP
CQ Level:       18–20        # lower = higher quality, bigger file
# --- or, if you prefer bitrate control:
Rate Control:   CBR
Bitrate:        80000 Kbps   # 4K60; use ~25000 for 1080p60
Keyframe Int.:  2 s
Preset:         P5 (Slow) / Quality
Profile:        main10       # main10 only if capturing HDR
Container:      mkv          # remux to mp4 after; mkv survives crashes

Record to MKV, not MP4. If OBS or your PC crashes mid-recording, an MKV is still playable up to the crash point, whereas a half-written MP4 is often a corrupt paperweight. Remux to MP4 afterward from OBS's File menu when you need a shareable file.

Audio routing for game and party chat

The PS5 sends game audio down HDMI, so it arrives on the capture device automatically. Party chat is separate and, by default, private — you route it deliberately or not at all. In OBS, keep the capture device's audio on its own track so you can mute or balance it independently of your microphone.

# OBS — Audio (Advanced Audio Properties)
Capture Device (PS5 HDMI audio):  Track 1  + Track 2
Microphone:                       Track 1  only
# Record multi-track so game vol and mic can be remixed later:
# Settings > Output > Recording > Audio Track: enable 1 and 2

Expected Output

A tutorial that never tells you what success looks like is useless, because you cannot debug against a feeling. Here is exactly what a healthy 4K60 PS5 capture reports.

Listing the device from the command line

If you want to confirm the OS sees the card independently of OBS, ffmpeg will enumerate DirectShow devices on Windows. The FFmpeg DirectShow wiki documents the syntax; the command and its expected output look like this.

ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy

Expected output — the card appears by name under video devices:

[dshow @ 000001...] DirectShow video devices (some may be both video and audio)
[dshow @ 000001...]  "Live Gamer Ultra 2.1"
[dshow @ 000001...]    Alternative name "@device_pnp_\\?\usb#vid_07ca..."
[dshow @ 000001...] DirectShow audio devices
[dshow @ 000001...]  "Digital Audio Interface (Live Gamer Ultra 2.1)"

If the card does not appear here, no amount of OBS fiddling will help — the problem is drivers, cable, or port, and you fix that first.

What a healthy OBS status bar shows

During a good recording, the OBS status bar at the bottom reports the target resolution and framerate, a stable timer, and — critically — 0 dropped frames. Open View > Stats for the detailed panel: "Frames missed due to rendering lag" and "Skipped frames due to encoding lag" should both sit at 0.0%. Any sustained climb in either number means your GPU or disk cannot keep up, and the fix is a lighter preset, a faster disk, or a lower resolution — in that order.

OBS status bar (healthy 4K60 recording)
---------------------------------------
REC: 00:01:00   3840x2160   60.00 fps   0 dropped frames
CPU: 6%   Disk: writing ~11 MB/s   Encoding lag: 0.0%

File sizes and bitrates you should see

Sanity-check the output file against physics. At CBR 80 Mbps, 4K60 HEVC lands near 0.6 GB per minute; at CQP 18 it varies with motion but stays in the same neighborhood. A 1080p60 recording at ~25 Mbps is roughly 0.19 GB per minute. If your sixty-second test produced a 5 MB file, capture silently failed and you recorded a black frame; if it produced 4 GB, your bitrate is wildly high. Both are signals, not mysteries.

Five Common Pitfalls

These five account for the overwhelming majority of wasted afternoons. Each is listed with the symptom you will actually observe and the fix.

HDCP, ports, and preview lag

1. HDCP left enabled. Symptom: game plays fine on the TV, but OBS shows a grey, black, or frozen rectangle. Fix: Settings > System > HDMI > Enable HDCP, OFF. This is the number-one first-timer failure, and it takes ten seconds to fix once you know.
2. Card on a USB 2.0 port or a shared controller. Symptom: the card connects but 4K60 is missing from the dropdown, or recordings stutter and drop frames. Fix: move to a USB 3.0+ port, ideally on its own controller, and use the bundled cable. A charge-only USB-C cable produces this exact fault.
3. Playing off the OBS preview. Symptom: input feels laggy and floaty, aim is off, rhythm games are unplayable. Fix: you were never meant to play on the preview. Play on the passthrough monitor from the card's HDMI OUT; the preview is for the audience.

Encoder and color mistakes

4. x264 encoder at 4K. Symptom: CPU pinned at 100%, heavy dropped frames, audio crackle. Fix: switch to NVENC/AMF/QSV hardware encoding in Output settings. Software encoding a 4K stream in real time is a fight your CPU loses.
5. HDR game captured through an SDR pipeline. Symptom: washed-out, grey, low-contrast footage. Fix: either set the PS5 to SDR for capture, or configure OBS's HDR handling and a tone-map properly (see Advanced). Do not leave an HDR console feeding an SDR OBS and hope; it will always look wrong.

A sixth deserves an honorable mention because it panics people: after you disable HDCP, streaming apps go black. That is not a fault, it is HDCP doing its job. Re-enable HDCP to watch Netflix; games will then stop capturing until you turn it off again. If your PS5 also starts misbehaving in unrelated ways after a lot of setting changes, a clean reboot into Safe Mode to clear the PS5 cache resolves a surprising amount of HDMI-handshake weirdness.

Troubleshooting Table

When the sixty-second test fails, work the table. Symptom on the left, the cause that is true most of the time in the middle, the fix on the right.

Advanced Tips

Once the basic 4K60 chain records cleanly, these are the refinements that separate a working setup from a good one. None are required; each solves a specific higher-order problem.

HDR10 done right, and why you often shouldn't

Capturing HDR is legitimate but expensive in complexity. You need a card that captures HDR (the 4K S, notably, caps HDR capture at 1080p60 even though it captures 4K60 in SDR), an HDR-aware OBS output using a 10-bit format like P010 and the main10 profile, and a plan for tone-mapping down to SDR for platforms that do not accept HDR. The failure mode is capturing beautiful HDR and then dumping it into an SDR YouTube upload that looks grey and dead. Unless you have a specific reason to preserve HDR, capturing in SDR is the lower-variance choice, and it is what most creators actually ship.

VRR, 4K120, and the two-cable reality

Variable refresh rate and 4K120 passthrough exist only on HDMI 2.1 cards — the Elgato 4K X, the 4K Pro, the GC553G2. Even then, remember that these are passthrough capabilities: you play in 4K120 VRR on your monitor while the file captures 4K60. To make the passthrough leg carry 4K120, both HDMI hops must be 48 Gbps Ultra High Speed cables, and the console must be set to allow 120 Hz output. Feed a 4K120 signal into an HDMI 2.0 card and you get nothing; feed it through a 4K60-rated cable and you get instability and dropped VRR.

Dual-PC and direct ffmpeg capture

For zero performance impact on the game, run a two-PC setup: the gaming PC outputs to the card, the card feeds a second PC that does nothing but encode. It is the standard professional topology and it removes capture overhead from the machine running the game entirely. If you would rather skip OBS for a scripted archival capture, ffmpeg can pull from the card directly and hand it to NVENC — useful for automated, unattended recording.

# Direct capture, DirectShow source to NVENC HEVC, no OBS
ffmpeg -f dshow -rtbufsize 512M \
  -video_size 3840x2160 -framerate 60 \
  -i video="Live Gamer Ultra 2.1":audio="Digital Audio Interface (Live Gamer Ultra 2.1)" \
  -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset p5 -rc vbr -cq 19 -b:v 80M -maxrate 120M \
  -c:a aac -b:a 320k \
  ps5_session.mkv

The AVerMedia GC553G2's headline 4K144 capture lives here too, in vendor-software territory: AVerMedia's Streaming Center on Windows uses MJPEG to hit 4K144, which OBS and ffmpeg's standard paths will not. If 144 fps archival genuinely matters to you, that is the one workflow that produces it; for everything else, 4K60 is the target.

Complete Working Config

Here is the entire build condensed into one reference block: console settings, the physical chain, and the OBS profile that produces a clean 4K60 HEVC recording. Copy it, adapt the encoder to your GPU, and you have a working PS5 capture rig.

The full reference block

# ============ PS5 CAPTURE — COMPLETE 4K60 CONFIG (2026) ============

# --- PS5 CONSOLE SETTINGS ---
Screen and Video > Video Output:
    Resolution         : 2160p (or 1080p to start)
    120 Hz Output      : Automatic (HDMI 2.1 card) / Off (HDMI 2.0 card)
    VRR                : On (HDMI 2.1 card only)
    HDR                : Off for first capture (SDR is simpler)
System > HDMI:
    Enable HDCP        : OFF        # REQUIRED to capture games
                                    # (turn ON again to watch Netflix)

# --- PHYSICAL CHAIN ---
PS5 HDMI OUT  --[48 Gbps cable]-->  CARD HDMI IN
CARD HDMI OUT --[48 Gbps cable]-->  TV / MONITOR   (play here)
CARD USB-C    --[bundled cable]-->  PC USB 3.0+    (own controller)

# --- OBS: VIDEO ---
Base / Output Resolution : 3840x2160
FPS                      : 60
Downscale Filter         : Lanczos

# --- OBS: OUTPUT (Advanced, Recording) ---
Encoder        : NVIDIA NVENC HEVC   # or AMD HW H.265 / QuickSync HEVC
Rate Control   : CQP
CQ Level       : 19
Keyframe Int.  : 2 s
Preset         : P5 (Quality)
Profile        : main   (main10 only if capturing HDR)
Container      : mkv    (remux to mp4 afterward)
Audio Tracks   : 1 (mix) + 2 (game-only)

# --- OBS: SOURCE ---
Source type    : Video Capture Device
Resolution/FPS : Custom -> 3840x2160 @ 60
Color Space    : Rec.709   Color Range: Limited

# --- ACCEPTANCE TEST ---
# Record 60 s of motion+sound. Confirm:
#   OBS stats: 0 dropped frames, encoding lag 0.0%
#   File size ~0.6 GB/min at 4K60 (~0.19 GB/min at 1080p60)
#   Audio locked to video, correct resolution
# ==================================================================

The sign-off

That is the whole machine. Note what it is not: it is not a "PS5 capture card" configuration, because no such object exists. It is a general HDMI capture chain with the console's copy-protection switch flipped and the bitrate set high enough to respect 4K. The card underneath can be a $160 Elgato 4K S or a $299.99 GC553G2 or a $30 dongle running 1080p — the wiring, the HDCP toggle, the passthrough-versus-capture logic, and the acceptance test do not change. Buy for the capture resolution you will actually upload, not the passthrough number on the box, verify the part number against a real SKU rather than a phantom one, and test for sixty seconds before you trust it for two hours. The hardware is easy. The lies about the hardware are what cost the afternoon.

Primary references used in this tutorial: AVerMedia — how capture cards work, GamesRadar best capture card 2026, PC Gamer best capture cards, Windows Central GC553G2 review, the OBS Studio knowledge base, and the FFmpeg DirectShow wiki.