
Video capture requires a quite large amount data mission, especially HD or ultra-HD video capture. PCI Express adopts point-to-point transmission, which could greatly decrease the costs of system development and manufacturing because the complexity and difficulty of the hardware platform design is loweredĭata transmission rate required by video capture and PCIe transmission rate.In contrast, if the user uses PCI cards, mounting one more card will cause the previous data transmission rate to drop.

In actual application, if the user uses PCIe cards, even though one more card is mounted, the previous data transmission rate will not decrease. In consequence, the data transmission rate will become lower with the increase of lanes. In comparison, PCI bus is a parallel bus and its total bandwidth is fixed.

PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe, is the new generation of bus standard. As a result, except for some low-end cards or cards developed several years ago, most video capture cards in today’s market use PCIe slots. At present, motherboard manufacturers seldom provide PCI slot on motherboards and use PCIe instead. It was first used in servers and later on gradually applied to PCs. PCI was introduced by Intel in 1991 as the PCI Local Bus Standard and it became the standard bus afterwards. This article mainly introduces PCIe and its application in video capture cards. The USB interface is easier to use because its slot on the desktop and laptop is external, but the highest data transmission rate is lower than that of PCIe. For PCIe, each slot has dedicated bandwidth, so it is more suitable for multi-channel video capture.

The PCIe slot is located inside the chassis. There are two types of mainstream motherboard interface of video capture cards, PCIe and USB interface.

Motherboard interface of video capture cards
