Matrox vs Radeon
 

Are there any advantages/disadvantages to using the Matrox RT.X100 Extreme Pro vs the top of the line Radeon card (I believe it's the X850 XT)? I need it for editing with Premiere 1.5 & After Effects.

Both cards do different things, and are different kinds of cards.

The matrox provides hardware acceleration for specific effects within Premiere Pro.
It may be picky about hardware (i.e. your motherboard). I would do research.

The top of the line Radeon card is good at directX acceleration and poor in openGL acceleration (compared to the workstation lines, like ATI/Fire and Nvidia/Quadro). After Effects can use openGL and directX acceleration... I'm not sure what effects go to which.

"The matrox provides hardware acceleration for specific effects within Premiere Pro.
It may be picky about hardware (i.e. your motherboard). I would do research."

What he said...

i think ur gettin the 2 confused thou..

the RTx100 is an accelerator/realtime DV board which allows for realtime processing of DV and Matrox Filters. These work well, btu are seriously dated, on top of that, there is also the "prerender" requirement on certain things.

the ati youre refering to is a display card.. from memory, the RTx is VERY VERY meticulous on how and what is displayed on whatever display ur running.

if ur going for an RTx, i would recommend a Matrox Parhelia GFX display adapter, as they work well hand in hand and the opengl and DX functions will work fine within Prem and After Effects.
The only issue is that it doesnt have the 3d grunt that these spanky new gfx cards have....