What reasonably priced video card for Edius?

[mike0130]

I've tested lots of video cards and I can assure that for Edius itself you do not have to spent money- It doesn't use the GPU power at all, additional effects- is a different story. If you do not care about Xplode Pro/for Edius- go for nvidia card. Don't do stupid moves in Quadra direction- save some money for food. Quadra (256mb) is for heavy 3D rendering, and "simple" 8800GT with 512mb will beat it very easy in Vitascene and other 3rd party effects, it will better work with Boris products and most 3D applications. Last good Quadra's with 1024mb will cost you approx. as 3 good computers, but will not make any difference, cause you can get this performance from 8800-9800 nVidia cards.
If you want the best "for today" including Xplode's- go for ATI, the best stable known card is X1950, I use HIS X1950 Pro 512mb- with IceCube cooler- it's unbelievably quiet and cool and it is factory overclocked- just perfect! Cards X1950XT or XTX even more powerful and also very good, you may still get yours. Very cheap.
Good luck.
mike

[swsw1550]

Quadro NOT Quadra

Quadro cards are designed for 3D and also Editing, and they are a totaly different arctechure than 8800 and 9800 cards, this is why they are so dear and many studios in hollywood use them, 8800 and the 9800 cards are soley designed for gamers,

[swsw1550]

Some information on Quadro Cards

I have posted information about these cards in the past, but thought I better do it again, also if you haven't used one of the high end cards i.e 5400 or 5600 or even the 4500 and 4600 Quadro cards why post comments about them until you use them.
P.S these are not gaming cards..

• Full 128-Bit Precision Graphics Pipeline with 12-Bit Subpixel Precision
• 32-Bit Floating Point Precision
• 128MB up to 1.5GB Ultra High Performance Graphics DDR3 Memory
• Ultra Efficient 256-Bit Memory Interface
• Advanced Colour Compression & Early Z-Cul
• Cg High-Level Graphics Shader Language
• Genlock & Frame Lock
• Full-Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)
• Rotated-Grid Full-Scene Antialiasing (RG FSAA)
• Hardware 3D Window Clipping
• Hardware-Accelerated Pixel Read-Back
• Highest Workstation Application Performance
• High-Performance Display Outputs
• Next-Generation Vertex and Pixel Programmability (4.0)
• NVIDIA High Precision Dynamic-Range (HPDR) Technology
• NVIDIA Quadro Unified Memory architecture nView Multi-Display Technology
• NVIDIA SLI Technology™ & Quad Buffered Stereo
• Quad Dual-Link Digital Display Connectors Dual Dual-Link Digital Display Connectors
• NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)

[Jerry]

Quadro cards are designed for 3D and also Editing, and they are a totaly different arctechure than 8800 and 9800 cards, this is why they are so dear and many studios in hollywood use them, 8800 and the 9800 cards are soley designed for gamers,

Yes, they are wonderful cards for 3d, Cad Cam, and compositing. No doubt...and I don't believe anyone is disputing that.
However, any thing in the Quadro line past the FX1700 for Edius is overkill, unless of course, you are doing some AE work. For the most part, Edius will work with a $70 card. If we were doing 4k I would probably go with the Quadro upper level cards.
As far as working in AE, I am getting the same specs out of my 8800gts 512 as I was with my Quadro FX1500. I get better RT with the 8800 in Vitascene due to the 512 and it works with 1920x1080 timelines (my main settings). The FX1500 will not do that in Vitascene. My 2600xt 512 does the same as the 8800 in Edius with Explode and Vitascene but will do RT(blue line) in SD with the ATI renderer for Xplode. That is the $70 card. It does not pack the open gl punch of the Nvidia cards but works good with my 30 and 24 in monitors.