Third party plugins may depending on which ones they are.

To the best of my knowledge, (the full version of) Magic Bullet is the only software currently doing this.

Mike

and that prefers an nvidia card. the 8xxx series are $400+ while the 7xxx series are starting ~$150 for a GOOD card.

nvidia cards have good drivers that work well. ATI drivers for Windows are mixed, and imho not worth the trouble.

Matrox? Red flag. Check compatibility and user reports very carefully before you buy any graphics cards from Matrox. I bought a lot of their cards from their very first one until the unassuming G450 a few years ago. Their recent efforts are beyond mixed, I really don't understand what's happened to this once thoroughly excellent company.
They still have some excellent products, but you have to tread very carefully.

i've only have 1 issue with ATI drivers & that was the REALLY botched drivers back in the Vegas 3 era (remember that?). They do monthly releases though unlike everyone else who released "as needed." So ATI will always have a new driver that could possibly fix issues (if any) while nvidia/matrix wait until a "big" release.

I wouldn't go near ATI...

I've had VERY good experience with Matrox on my audio/video systems, currently running on a P750 with dual DVI + TV-out.
Thats the reason I'm looking at the APVe, despite the fact that HP recoments and approved the nVidía cards. (Along with Avid, Adobe etc.)

Someone suggested getting a nVidia "consumer" card instead. But are they really as good at 2D & video as the workstation cards?

Kim.

RE. ATI:

I've been running an ATI x7xx PCIe card for two years, and the drivers have been rock solid. I've had a few strange things with my nVidia 6800 this past year.

Now in the past, ATI drivers were very bad, but the past two years have been much, much better. Absolutely no problems. My external monitor runs from a second ATI 9800 DVI interface.

And I go way back to my first ATI card, the All In Wonder. All 4MB of it.

I've always had good experience with ATI as hardware. I generally toss the disc that comes with the cards instead of installing it. Window's own drivers handle the cards much better than ATI's drivers. About the only thing we use ATI's software for is the multi-desktop utility that lets the user swap windows around to different monitors with keystrokes, but we only use that on the projection computer at church.

never had a prob with ati cards on any of my machines, but, i did upgrade to nvidia GT series when i got my lappy (came with a go7300 256mb card..) when i noticed the increase in performance, i got a 6800gs 256bit 512mb card and unlocked the pipelines.

makes a hellofa difffference with MagicBullet2 as well as every other app which used the GPU.. does nothing for vegas, but for other apps, its worth it

You may want to open it and listen carefully if you get the nVidia Quadro FX1500. A lot of them have defective fans that make a considerable amount of noise.

John

Lots of pros & cons in the ATI vs Nvidia wars -- two vid related suggestions in my opinion anyway: Some of the higher end effects and 3d apps rely on OpenGL, which ATI is currently weak at. Nvidia OTOH is hard to buy because features vary by whatever company's whim -- same chipset doesn't mean anything close to same features or performance.

I ordered the Matrox APVe.
Except for Vegas, the abillity to run two displays plus TV/HDTV out is a feature I didn't want to loose compared to my current setup.
Now I just hope it's compatible with the xw4400!?

Kim.

Matrox have an inexistant support and no consideration for their customers, i sent several mail to support (France, UK & Canada) i never have response. I will never buy Matrox product in the future.

ATI with weak OGL support is one of those "computer myths" like only Intel is "inter compatible" (it's always ibm compatible!). That also stems mostly from gamers. And ATI doesn't always perform as well as nvidia in games. A few FPS difference. (ooooooohhhhhhhh). Infact, the game Prey (Spot never said what he had to do with it!) is one of the latest OGL games & it's runs awesome on ATI cards.

the reason nvidia varies so much is because nvidia stopped making cards & just does chipsets, so whomever makes the card itself decides all the extras. That's good (because you can get great deals at times) & bad (because there's so many variants out there, all confusing & with extra letters on the end like XT, GTX, GX, etc).

FYI though, the Quadro will most likely be WAY overkill. But you could very well have a use for it.

Too bad the post production pros are so confused. They've pretty much switched over from ATI to nvidia-based cards. Must be Alzheimer's. :O)

Seriously, if you check the professional magazine reviews of video cards for post use, you'll find that nvidia's OpenGL drivers are more reliable and generally work better across the board, both on the consumer boards and on the workstation boards.

The differences used to be greater between gamer boards and workstation boards, today there are quite a few pros who make do with "gamer boards" the exceptions being mainly those who work with the top end 3D packages where you must have the utmost in rendering performance and feature availability.

ATI has some FireGL cards that are quite respectable, and their recent 1900 etc. series consumer cards are really quite good. Getting there though, you have to jump over more duds than in the case of nvidia-based cards.

I've seen Nvidia has "graphical problems" that it hasn't had in the past since the 6xxx consumer line. The biggest one is that it doesn't support DirectX before version 6/7-ish (screen gets all garbled) & the ambient hardware lights aren't OGL standard (instead they switched to their own "better" version, but it's broken for older software that used the OGL standard). They don't seem to care about fixing those (and it is an nvidia specific problem, no ATI's have those problems as of yet).

But both companies are "dumbing down" their card for dev's apparently though, so if a programmer specifying function X & the card "corrects" the user that they should of meant Y, it uses Y. AT least that's what was said in '05. I haven't heard anything negative about their hardware since then.

In reality, it doesn't matter which card you get, any ATI Radeon or Nvidia Geforce (except the FX/MX ones) are great cards. The newest cards of both are superb (Nvidia has the one up with the DX 10 8xxx series) & worth every penny. I plan on getting an ATI x1950 in the next few weeks. It's ~$200 which isn't bad & the next best card up is a $300 Nvidia 7950GTX (or something) or the $450-800 8xxx series cards. To rich for my blood. :)

I'm not a gamer so I was a bit surprised to hear that there are still pre-DX6 games out there, amazing. What is this, the original Myst?

I have nothing against games, but to me life itself provides the ultimate game with plenty of excitement, and it's filling up my horizon already.

I certainly have been impressed by the astonishing development in realtime graphics though, it's mind boggling really.

For non-gaming, pure post work using pro level apps under Windows, it is currently safer to go with nVidia cards than with ATI cards, this according to both pro users and the manufacturers of the high level applications.

This is no sneer on ATI, just a different focus of nvidia's driver development.

Caution on PNY's nvidia cards though, as their "lifetime warranty" is only good until the next version of each card comes out... I prefer eVGA among the consumer cards, they have great policies.

Tom's Hardware just came out with a new comparison of video cards, where ATI cards took the top rankings for gamer cards, and 100% of the nVidia-based workstation cards trounced 100% of ATI's workstation cards in nearly 100% of the tests.

Different focus.