Video Card Question

[Alex Gubanov]

I'm building new PC and would like to ask adwise for video card.
I will use it both for video editing (PPro 1.5) and for CAD/3D/Animation (Keycreator and AutoCAD, 3d studio max and After Effects). Very rare I may have to capture analog video.
This is my system:

Asus P5WD2 Premium w/Pendium D 830 (3.0 GHz)
1 GB CORSAIR @ 800 MHz (512 MB x 2)
HD 1: 74GB WD Raptor
HD 2: 200 GB WD (planning to add one more 200 GB WD drive on RAID 0)
ViewSonic VP201b monitor

I need Open GL and Direct X video card with excelent and sharp picture.
Here is my list of preferences, but I'm not sure which one will be the best choise (image quality/value).

1. Matrox Parhelia APVe or PNY Quadro FX 540
2. ATI FireGL V5100 or PNY Quadro FX 1300
3. ATI FireGL V7100

Thanks for any help.
Alex

[Rob Lohman]

That's a tough question. Today's video cards are all good enough for video
editing work. But as you said, the "trouble" is with 3D and OpenGL. However,
I do believe the current ATI and nVidia cards have good solid OpenGL drivers.
Perhaps you can check which cards are on the supported lists for those 3D
applications?

It may also be better to post such a question to an AutoCad board for
example. They should have much more experience with these issues than
a general video board like this.

Good luck!

[Glenn Chan]

1- With the gaming lines, the ATI drivers are kind of buggy. I have a ATI 9200SE and it doesn't show the graphics for Folding@Home right. But gaming cards were never really designed for openGL.

2- If you're feeling adventurous, you can try flashing a Geforce 6600 into the equivalent $1300 workstation card. Of course, no one is going to guarantee this will work and it will likely void the warranty.

3- I believe image quality is very comparable between cards. With DVI outputs, the image will look exactly the same.

[Alex Gubanov]

Thanks, Rob & Glenn,

All cards I listed has support for Open GL and some for Direct X (for sure Parhelia card do). What difference will be between, for example, $300 card (Matrox Parhelia APVe) and $579 card (ATI FireGL V5100)? Speed? Both has 128 MB memory, but you can purchase almost two Matrox cards for the price of one ATI card. Is ATI really better and if it does, why?

What is best card for video editing only (PPro 1.5 and After Effects):
Matrox Parhelia APVe or PNY Quadro FX 540, ATI FireGL V5100 or PNY Quadro FX 1300, ATI FireGL V7100?

Thanks for any help.
Alex

[Glenn Chan]

The Matrox Parhelia gives you 3 monitors in *particular* configurations. Most other cards give you 1 or 2.
If your motherboard supports SLI, you can get 2 video cards and output to 4 monitors. And there are other ways to get 3+ monitors, which is typically unnecessary for video editing.

I believe the 3d performance on the Parhelia is slow... it's an old video card to begin with, and it wasn't very fast when it came out.
techreport.com is one site that has benchmarks on it.

The workstation cares (ATI Fire and Nvidia Quadro) have much better openGL performance versus the gaming cards (radeon, geforce) because they aren't crippled at openGL. OpenGL helps real-time previews for particular effects in AE. As far as I know, they don't help rendering speeds.

[Peter Jefferson]

glens on the nail here, but another thing to consider is that a NVidea 6800 will give the same performance as a SLI configged pair of 6600's
Also ATI card will give a cleaner video overlay and allow for manipulation of that overlay, basically u can calibrate it to a colour bars is u really need to without affectng the overall calibration of the workspace

the differences between cards is bitrate (128bit = standard gaming and basic video editing, 256bit = high end gaming and video editing <even with low memory, these units usually perform better than a 128bit card> and 512, which is for high end displays, multi displays, video and CG editing,
memory capacity, memory speed and core speed.
Also most of these newer cards can be overclocked by about 10 to 20 %

there are many sites (jsut google search) which review each card with their own merits.

As for the newer gcards, most are now running opengl2, after effects will not use these features for any processing apart from the actual drawing of the opengl effect in realtime. With the way Adobe build their SW, AE will not take advantage of the fact that u are running opengl 1.2 (older/lower end cards )or v2 newer pcix and high end agp cards
You rendering will not increase in speed whatsoever.. not many video applications have teh grunt to be able to stream a DV Clip and manipulate and process it in realtime through a GFX card only. The GFX cards and PCI bus just dont have the bandwidth to do this...

Now im just waiting on a clever company to release a GFX card with an inbuilt DV encoder/Decoder... basically a generic RTX with pumping 3d... now that would rok..it would also be quite expensive.. lol

[Alex Gubanov]

Thanks everyone for your help!

Alex