Why does a video capture card need an additional computer?

Question

Video broadcast

If you read reviews of various video capture cards, you can read something like "Great choice if you have a second average computer" or something like that. I don’t quite understand, isn’t the video capture card designed to offload the computer when recording / streaming? Why does she need a second computer?

Answer 1

Computer resources are still spent on recording, transcoding and streaming.

Answer 2

During streaming, computer resources are needed: 1 - for the game. 2 - encoding images in OBS. 3 - programs for improving the quality of pictures from a webcam. 4 - chat program or browser with an open chat from the broadcast. Not all computers can pull such a load. Therefore, a video capture card is used. On the first computer, we launch the game and nothing else. Using a video capture card, we transfer the video stream with the game to the second computer, where we integrate it into OBS. OBS itself encodes the overall picture with the game, webcam, donation and sends it to the streaming service. Also on the second computer, programs from points 2, 3, 4 are launched. And thus the load is shared.