Do you need a capture card?

A capture card takes an HDMI signal from another device and turns it into something your streaming PC can see as a video source. That's the entire job. Which means the useful question isn't “which capture card” — it's whether you have a second device at all.

The three cases where you do need one

• Console streaming from a PC. Your PS5 or Xbox outputs HDMI; a capture card is how that reaches OBS. (Both consoles can also broadcast natively without any PC at all — see streaming from PS5 or Xbox before you buy anything.)
• A two-PC setup. The gaming PC sends its output to a second PC that does nothing but encode and stream. This keeps encoding entirely off the machine running the game.
• A real camera as your webcam. A DSLR, mirrorless or camcorder with clean HDMI out becomes a dramatically better webcam through a capture card.

The specs that actually matter

• Capture resolution and framerate — what OBS receives. 1080p60 is plenty, since that's at or above what you're streaming anyway.
• Passthrough — a second HDMI out that sends the signal onward to your TV or monitor, unprocessed. This is the spec that matters most for console play. Without it you're playing on the OBS preview, which has enough delay to make anything reflex-based unplayable.
• Passthrough resolution is separate from capture resolution. A card can capture at 1080p60 while passing 4K120 through to your TV — so you play at full quality and stream at sane quality. Check both numbers.
• Connection — USB 3.0 external (portable, simple, works with laptops) or PCIe internal (lower latency, one less cable, desktop only).

Getting it working in OBS

1. Console HDMI out → capture card IN. Capture card OUT → your TV or monitor. Card → PC by USB.
2. In OBS, add a Video Capture Device source and pick the card.
3. Play on the TV, not on the OBS preview. The preview lags by design. If you only have one screen, that's an argument for native console broadcasting instead.
4. Mute the capture device's audio if you're also capturing it elsewhere, or you'll get a doubled, echoing game sound — a very common first-stream problem.
5. Turn off HDCP if you're getting a black screen.

On two-PC setups

It's the classic “proper” streaming setup and it is mostly obsolete for new streamers. Hardware encoders like NVENC made single-PC streaming cheap enough in performance terms that a second machine buys very little — see resolution and bitrate for why. Unless you already own a spare PC, that money does more good in a microphone or lighting.

If you're capturing a console, streaming from PS5 or Xbox covers the whole path end to end.