Video Cards - the Agony of Choice!
 

Looking at Purchasing New DELL

Does anyone have an opinion on the x16 ATI Radeon X300 SE Video card and whether (for video editing) it is worth the extra $800AUD for the x16 ATI Radeon X800 XT?

Some differences from the doco:

325 MHz vs 500 MHz Controller Speed
196 MHz vs 500 MHz On Board Memory Speed
128 Mb vs 256 Mb Memory
128-bit vs 256-bit Controller data Width
64-bit vs 256-Bit On Board Memory Data Width

Are these differences of major value in Video Editing or are they mainly for Games players?

Advice appreciated!

This is going to get moved because it is OT for this forum. However, the video card provides little help for video editing. Most editing software do not use card features. You CAN get video accelerator cards (Canopus, for example) that work with some software. The cards you mentioned are primarily for games performance.

For compositing, some NLEs can take advantage of video card acceleration. In that case I believe the workstation cards are better since they are designed for better openGL acceleration. i.e. the Quadro and Wildcat lines from Nvidia and ATI.

2- THen there are hardware acceleration hardware/cards. With Premiere Pro there are lots of cards with good bundle deals, although I dont know how likely you will get them working. Check Premiere forums before buying.

With Avid you can get Mojo.

Vegas and Edition doesn't have anything for it AFAIK.

Final Cut Pro has the Cinewave (>$3k), which is kind of pointless if you have a dual processor G5.

3- Not sure what computer prices are like in Australia but generally speaking Dell's upgrades/add-ons are usually overpriced (2X or more compared to street prices for some upgrades). In the US some of the upgrades are very resonable (video card, sound card) and others overpriced.

Any video card may work. Depends. Many RT cards and software support video overlay on the computer monitor. You'd want to make certain you don't require a specific genre of card for that.

If you use 3D or compositing programs, some of them take advantage of the calculating abilities of the game cards to generate almost real time previews of your work.

I use a Radeon 9600Pro which has dual display capbility (good for video editing) and will acellerate my After Effects previews.

It was a balance (at the time) between cost and performance.

I'm running a ATI 9800XT since I want to edit and storm Omaha Beach. :)

Like mike, I use a Radeon9600 and I am satisfied with it, for both games (gasp, I play games on my editor :) ) and for editing.