Sometimes it's necessary to test the limits of technology. I'm sure it's the computer, or the setup. Today's experiment was to see if using NDI would have any significant effect over doing an SDI loopback for video ingest into Unreal Engine. Spoiler: It did.

Unreal Engine : 

Running the NDI SDK plugin. This is all very straight forward, and allows an apparent unlimited amount of streams.

vMix :

vMix has an NDI listener built in. I'm unsure of whether the NDI is activated by a client connection, however I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case. The alternative here is to route the video directly out of one of the Decklink outputs, and route it back in through the Smarthub as a loopthrough.

Conclusions ;

The NDI streams appeared to have a significant hit on Unreal Engine's performance, much more so than the decklink inputs. This could be because the NDI streams were being encoded on the same machine as the Unreal Rendering. Further tests are needed to conclude here, however i'm aware that by elliminating one CPU bottleneck might introduce another in the form of network latency. All in all, I am very impressed with how easy the NDI streams were to set up, more testing is needed!