Interesting idea Richard. How do you configure a WinXP system to use 2 different graphics cards in such a manner?

I do not think you can have multiple video cards from different vendors without serious issues.

That aside, I can at least enlighten those of you to my latest findings and what I have settled on.

First I have given up on the overlay on a second screen. I realize that only ATI supports this now and that's good, but Magic Bullet does not seem to utilize ATI Gpu so render times with magic bullet projects increased by 10-15 times and previews were impossible.

I installed an EVGA Nvidia GTX 260 and was holding my breath when I loaded my first Premiere project with Magic BUllet applied. Since the new GTX2xx series has strayed from the NVidia 68xx, 78xx, 88xx and 98xx architecture I was scared it would not work. But.....alas it does.

Man does Magic BUllet utilize the GPU.....it took 1:16 to render 48 seconds of Magic Bullet 1080 24P footage on the timeline....this was with a lot of diffusion effects too.

I then turned off the "use GPU" option in Magic BUllet and the same 1:16 was up to 15 minutes when I stopped it. So you could say it is 15 times faster with this GPU than with none.

As far as realtime playback it is likely about half....maybe 12-14 frames per second in high quality and maybe 20 FPS in draft mode.

Just wanted to let anyone out there know this. I am still using Cineform but I tend to think I'll be primarily using it for compression, and not so much for the realtime engine since I can no longer monitor it on my HDTV directly from Premiere.

I'll post if there are any changes. For video cards though, if you use Magic BUllet much, I'd recommend staying away from ATI until this gets resolved.