will new video card boosts performance or just overhead?
 

hi all,
i edit my own short films and some commercial stuff, shot mostly with dv/dvcam, and just now starting to get into HD, and i do this through FCP Studio on a PowerMac Quad that came with the stock nVidea GeForce 6600...

question is: is the $800 upgrade for the Geforce 7800GT video card worth the investment...

the only graphics i do is a minimal amount in Motion, may purchase Shake and AE soon for minimal special effects, but don't plan on doing any 3D stuff and i'm not a gamer...

so will there be a boost in performance or quality in my editing, will i be able to stream more HD simultaneously, or is this card mostly for the gamers and the 3D artists?
thanks,
Lonnie

at the present time the GPU is not heavily utilised by FCP and as such, having a big heavy lifter of a gfx card will not empower your editing experience; no boost in performance or quality, no extra streams of HD.
that said, the very latest version (5.1.2) has finally added support for Motion's FXPlug architecture, which relies directly on the GPU, and so some of those effects now appear in FCP and consequently are handled by the GPU. the bigger/better you gfx card the faster those particular fx can be handled ... but you can probably live without those fx.

looking to the future however, we can probably expect FCP to become far far more GPU codependent. many expect announcements as early as NAB may begin to indicate the likelyhood and time to market for such future developments.

so, if you do only minmal work in Motion, and don't expect those needs to increase dramatically in the near future, then your money may be better off in the bank until such time as your investment will reap bigger rewards (and the card you're after will be that little bit cheaper)