ATI FireGL vs ???

[Aaron Marshall]

Needless to say, my goal is to run AE. Does it make a big difference to have one of these fancy smancy FireGL cards over, say a Radeon X700 that supports OpenGL? I want a video card for a workstation, not something to play the latest video game on (i'll build another machine for that purpose ).

What are the major advantages of such a card? Who has one? Could anyone shine some light on the subject. Thanks.

 

[Shaw]

It shouldn't make much of a difference for After Effects. The main difference between the 'workstation' cards and gaming cards is that the workstation cards have been certified to operate completely with software like Maya etc. There are, of course, differences in power between the cards depending on their age but all things being equal you shouldn't see any benefit for AE work by spending more.

Here's a list of certified OpenGL cards provided by Adobe:

http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html