Hi,
I'm looking for a not too pricey replacement graphics card for combustion as my old trusty matrox card died on me this week(in the meantime working on a lowly radeon 9200se). Because the system is relatively old it only has AGP and as I plan to get a new system sometime in the future anyway I am really reluctant to sink a lot of cash to beef up the old one.
Initial research has shown that probably my best bets are Ati HD2600 xt or x850 xt - they both go for the same price (around 50EUR) and both seem like quite decent cards. Now the question is which one of them is better? x850 has higher memory bandwidth but the 2600 is based on newer tech and from what I've heard offers superior HD decoding quality, effectively reducing cpu load (which with a by current standards more than modest P4 2,8GHz is highly welcome) plus
it supports sm 3.0 & 4.0 - don't know of how much use this is for compositing/3D apps though.
Alternatively if I spend 50EUR more I can get a HD3850 - but will it give any performance boost to the mentioned apps at all over the previous cards or will I just be dumping another 50EUR for no purpose? The HD3850 does have 512MB of VRAM as opposed to 256MB of both 2600 and x850 - is it important for openGL compositing to have as much Vram as possible or are 256MB more than enough?
Now the reason I'm not considering Nvidia is because I've had a chance to borrow one from a friend to test and while it is quite fast (for my purposes) it unexplainably distorted colours in the video overlay in edius which I use for editing (the radeon display is surprisingly similar to the matrox one). I'm not sure if it was only that particular card or if this all Nvidia cards are subject to this colour shift (after effects and combustion displays were normal by the way).
I've heard that Nvidia's opengl implementation is generaly better than Ati's - does this have a real impact on preview performance in After Effects/combustion?
Anyway if I were to go with Nvidia my only option would be 7600gt.
Hopefuly someone can give me some good advice.
Thanks in advance,
Vadim