What does the graphic card do?
 

Hi guys.
What's the importance of a good graphic card on a system, I always thought that the expensive cards were only for gaming? Does it affect the rendering? And the quality?

Is a 8600gt 1gb ddr2 enough? What's the most valuable (not expensive)?

Thanks!

I know that there are some effect plugins for after effects that use the graphic card to speed up the rendering process but for all other encoding tasks the graphic card does nothing, then it's only the pc processor that does all the work.
So any graphics card will do for your editing system, it just depends what you intent to use it for. I would start to check what cards your editing software supports as it might use some features from specific cards to give you a better preview while editing. Also if you intend to watch blu-ray movies from your pc your card must be able to handle that.
Also see that the card has the right connectors for the screens you intend to attach. Some cards have beside a dvi connector also hdmi.
So, if you don't intent to play a game like Crysis any midrange card will do.

Some graphics cards have processors on board normally known as Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Some editing hardware uses the processor on-board the card to speed up effects. My Matrox Axio LE system does this and is therefore fairly picky about which cards it likes.

Not sure if any software-only solution uses the GPU for video based tasks...

converts energy to heat ;-)

// Laze

with 100% efficiency.