video card advice

cheezweezl

cheezweezl

Veteran
i'm selling off my g5 and buying a mac pro. it will be used primarily for fcp and ae. my plan is to upgrade the video card on the mac pro to the nvidia 8800 512mb. is this a decent card for ae or is there something better out there? apple offers the quattro fx 1.5gb card but it's like $2700 and i can't afford it. any ideas?
 
cheezweezl said:
my plan is to upgrade the video card on the mac pro to the nvidia 8800 512mb. is this a decent card for ae or is there something better out there? apple offers the quattro fx 1.5gb card but it's like $2700 and i can't afford it. any ideas?
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Don't bother with either option, unless you really want that 8800GT for other reasons like gaming. After Effects has notoriously poor OpenGL implementation, which is the only benefit you might get from a video card. Artists using even top of the line Quadro cards report less than impressive improvement vs. disabling openGL altogether and using an affordable card. The 8800GT won't get you any extra features or speed in AE than the default Mac Pro card will.

FCP may be a slightly different story, but even there you would be way better off spending $299 on a Blackmagic Decklink card to handle video acceleration.
 
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