I have recently purchased Final Cut Studio 2 and I was hoping to receive some input on a good graphics card to purchase.

My system requirements are a Dual 2.0 Ghz processor with 4GB of ram and the original ATi 9600.

Working in Motion or even Livetype for that matter is so freaking slow. I thought by boosting the ram, this would help increase the speed of this issue, but it's only helped a little bit.

I've researched this ATI Radeon X1900 XT and the reviews on apple's website from consumers say it's garbage. That may be only for gaming, and not video editing intensive, but I would think the card would be working more doing editing versus playing a game.

Any thoughts would be highly appreciated!

Thanks so much.

I recently purchased a ATI X800 XT for my dual G5 and got it after a long delay because of a backorder.

Long story short: It didn't work. Video corruption at all resolutions. Sent it in for service in October and still don't have it back

ATI was purchased recently by AMD and I am guessing the merger has/is affecting service for the Mac products. Don't think I'd purchase a ATI product again after this experience.

I'm in the same boat; I'm using a Dual 2.3Ghz G5 with the ATI 9600 and Motion bogs down quite quickly when adding a couple layers. When I'm doing stuff in HD there's no way to do a RAM preview - it's just too slow. So, me too, I was looking at the X800 G5 edition, but after reading all the users' comments on www.xlr8yourmac.com I got scared like hell. It seems the cards just don't work properly. In addition, the same site just yesterday posted an interview with somebody at AMD/ATI and it pretty much looks like those cards are already end-of-life. Here's the link:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/2007_QandA_with_AMD.html#start

For me this means I'm gonna stick with the G5 as it is as long as possible and then go straight to a MacPro or whatever. The good thing is that adding some more RAM to the G5 helped quite a bit. I found that having more than 3GB does make a lot of difference when having Motion and FCP6 open at the same time.

Hope this helps,
Dino

Thanks for the reply guys. It's a shame when you have to spend thousands of dollars in order to do the things you need to do creatively and efficiently. Monitors, memory, drives to graphics cards...geez!

I guess there aren't any other brand graphics cards for the mac then?

Definitely going from 1.5GB to 4.0GB has boosted the performance of my machine, but when it comes down to serious graphics or HD, or even color correction...it's way too slow. I get thrown out of my element and in this business, the faster you are able to get things finished, the more profits come our way.