Clock speed vs. Memory speed vs. Memory type

[jimrev]

There are lots of cards that are right under the $100 mark after rebates and they all seem to play a balancing game; to keep an economical price point, they'll jazz up one aspect of performance or maybe two, but not more. While a different card makes something really fast, but uses mediocre technology another uses the most advanced material, but not a lot of it. So I need a little advice on the video card situation. I do a lot of video editing, DVD authoring. multimedia stuff. I'm getting a 24" widescreen monitor and will soon be moving into the HD arena, with blu-ray following later on (most likely). Note that I don't play any games so that isn't a concern. I'm thinking that an 8600GT card with 512MB of DDR3 RAM but with the standard clock speed is good for my needs. Am I right?

Thanks!

 

[Continuity28]

Technically, the video card would only aid some of your needs, specifically playback. nVidia's "PureVideo HD" will help you with decoding/playback, but not with encoding or editing. DVD Authoring is purely CPU based as well.

If you want the PureVideo HD features, and don't care about gaming performance, any of these cards should suit you just fine. You don't need 512MB of video memory though.

What you lose by not getting such a video card is hardware acceleration, meaning your CPU will be doing a lot more work on decoding HD codecs. Depending on the speed of your processor, this can be really bad.

 

[heyheybooboo]

The 8600gt/2600xt hardware acceleration will reduce BluRay/HD-DVD playback cpu utilization as noted.

Since most of your work will be in '2D' you should not have a problem ... BUT ... remember if you attach a second monitor you effectively split the video card in half. This in itself should not be a problem either, except ...

As part of your design and dvd authoring you may stumble into 3D effects, modeling, texture-mapping, etc. So if you pick an 'entry-level' card with reduced memory or speed, run 2 monitors and stumble into some moderate 3D work you may encounter a reduction in performance.

Not a big deal - - - just something to consider

 

[jimrev]

Thanks guys. I knew that some of the newer cards (e.g. 8600) decoded the h.264 files of HD video, taking a big strain off the CPU, which is really the only reason I was thinking about a new graphics card. And I do come across more complex graphics from time-to-time so I guess an upgrade is in order, but looks like I don't need to strain myself trying to decide. It's too bad nVidia discontinued the WMV and MPG decoders that were on the Geforce 7 series. Those, along with h.264 and a few other codecs would have been a great step forward, and a help to us non-gamers.