Graphics Card Question

I'm thinking of upgrading my system sometime soon (G5 D2 / 4 G RAM / Panther / FCP 4.5 / Motion 1.1 / ATI RV350 64 MB / MEDEA RAID 960).
The idea is to switch to Tiger => upgrade softwares => upgrade graphics card.

Now, I would love to see a battle of opinions as to what graphics card people would choose. I'm thinking of the new and shiny ATI Radeon X800 XT. BUT, is it an overkill? Does it go well with the above systemm? Do I really need that much juice in the card? I remember reading an article by Greame or Mike (?) about Motion & ATI 9800 Pro. It appeared that ex. Motion likes to have a good card in the system.

I would appreciate your input, ladies & gentlemen. br...jb



jb

It would appear that Apple is heading for GPU power even more than CPU power, so I would suggest that you get the biggest baddest video card your machine can swallow. If not for today, certainly for tomorrow.

And - OH Yes, Motion 2.

sadly there really arent a ton of choices for these with a mac. i agree with john.
get the best you can and IMO thats the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL. its pretty much the biggest and baddest out there. and at $600 i think its a fair deal.

My 2¢:

The NVidia GeForce 6800 is not worth losing 2 PCI slots - especially the fastest PCI-X slot (G5 - Dual 2.3 & Dual 2.7 - Top slot) that's needed for fast storage / Kona 2 card / etc.

If it's just a graphics box your fine. I, personally, am planning an upgrade to the Dual 2.7 G5:

[www.apple.com]

It comes with an ATI Radeon 9650 with 256MB DDR SDRAM which SHOULD be more than sufficient for Motion 2 (anything with 256 Meg of VRAM is OK in my book).

- Joey

I would go with the X800 without a doubt. It's certainly not overkill for Motion. There's not a GPU out there, or will be for quite some time, that Motion can't use every bit of. I'm looking to get an X800 myself, although I'm hoping for the mythological Apple OEM X850 (512 MB RAM?)

There have been some issues with Tiger and the X800 though, so you might want to wait for an update from ATI, and/or 10.4.1.



- Justin Barham -

Good morning everybody. Thanks for your input.
It does appear that there are two contestants to
be taken seriously here, and they are the ones one
would expect. But what about the OEM X850? Is
this a myth to be busted? Naturally there'll be a 512
MB card out there, but will it sooner or later? Again,
thanks guys. jb



jb

X800 is great. Really enjoying it.

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

Why not a decklink/black magic card?
They are cheap and they are good as far as YUV cards go.

I am getting the Decklink extreme that can ingest HD/Beta etc