Video Card Advise

[Vad]

Hi!

I'm about to upgrade my video card but don't really know what would be the best choice.

Currently I have an old matrox g400 which has so far been sufficient for video editing and casual Cinema4D work, but as I currently have quite a bit of compositing and 3d work to do I thought it's time for an upgrade. My main concern is speed improvement in combustion (now it's just painfully slow, making it almost unusable other than for rotoscoping and colour correcting,

although the preview speed for those is quite slow as well)

as well as Cinema 4D.

The models I was considering would be:

- geforce 6800gs

- geforce 7600 gs

- ati x1600pro

- ati 1650pro

- ati x800gto

I know that those are considered gaming cards so I was wondering how much actual improvement they would yield over the matrox g400 (especialy in compositing) for serious work, as opposed to playing games (which I rarely ever do, so this aspect is completely insignificant).

Or would I be better advised to buy something cheaper as neither combustion nor cinema would benefit greatly from them?

Another concern is the picture quality - matrox is superb, so it would be a shame to have ugly or buggy 2d graphics, especialy when spending a lot of time starring at the monitor.

The reason I was considering the cards mentioned above is the price range of EUR95 - EUR150. I'm not prepared to spend more than EUR150 since I'm looking for an AGP card and am reluctant to invest more in a technology that may very well become obsolete in the near future (I would however happily spend less

As an alternative I was thinking about Matrox Millenium P650 (which costs somwehre around EUR140) but am not sure if the price would be justified considering it's inferior 3d qualities compared to ati and nvidia, but would willingly chose it if it has better 2d opengl support for compositing.

Any advise would be greately appreciated

[AJLynn]

None of those have any special features for improving Combustion performance. I've got the Mobility version of the x1600 in my laptop and it's good enough for most Cinema work, and softmods to a FireGL v5200 - see the thread "Another one for Intel Mac..."

[Antisthenes]

what is the cheapest (price/performance) PNY Quadro card going for now?

and what Gforce card softmods to a quadro bestest now aswell?

[AJLynn]

The cheapest Quadro cards are the ones with 3 digits in the model name - FX540, FX340 etc. They're not very good. I'm on an FX1500 at work and it's great. As for softmodding Geforces... I haven't been keeping up on that. The best place to go for that info is guru3d.com.