Which video card for the Mac Pro
 

Whats the difference between the ATI 2600 HD and the Nvidia 8800GT? For editing in FCP, do I need it? Is it that much faster?

Actually, the stock card (HD 2600) at this point in time is more than enough and many benchmarks peg it better than the 8800GT:

http://www.barefeats.com/imp04.html

Note that Barefeats mentions another card not yet available! For what it's worth, FC itself isn't so much interested in your video card. Applications such as Motion or APerture will take advantage of GPU processing.

Mike

Unfortunately, the Barefeats tests also don't mention anything about running Color. Also, their test is pretty superficial to me. Why they would pick a toy application like iMovie instead of the pro application (FCP) for their render test is beyond me. Take their results with a grain of salt, it's not exactly empirical data. A shame, as I am pondering that exact question.

Let's look at the specs:

ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Memory interface: 128-bit
Frame buffer memory: 256MB GDDR3
Memory Bandwidth: 25.6GB/s
Textured Triangles Per Second: 700 million

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Memory interface: 256-bit
Frame buffer memory: 512MB GDDR3
Memory Bandwidth: 72.0GB/s
Textured Triangles Per Second: 16.8 billion

Price difference in USD is currently $150 more for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.

The ATI will be absolutely fine for cutting in FCP, without a doubt. It isn't until you get into apps such as Motion, Color, Shake, Maya, After Effects, etc. that the benefits of the 8800 will show. I am speaking in theory at this point, as i have used neither. I'm curious to here about empirical testing between these two.

the drivers for the 8800 are far from ideal right now and you won't see all the performance it supposed to deliver. the only bet is if apple fixes the drivers some time very soon.

what sort of issues have people been experiencing? are the driver issues causing the 8800 to lag behind the 2600?