I have been noticing as I have been working on two different Final Cut Studio workstations that the difference in speed within the Motion environment is dramatically better with a beefy graphics card. So my question is, what is the ULTIMATE graphics card to use with Motion?

When I bought my Mac I bought a refurbished one. This was a great computer but it did not offer a custom machine configuration. I wanted to upgrade my graphics card and thought a GeForce 8800 GT would be a the way to go. I found out that this card was slower than the Radeon HD 2600 XT. WHAT!!! The 8800 has got to be faster. Well I found out it has problems rendering image core units found in Motion and other pro apps. Check this out.

www.barefeats.com/harper10.html

TheVizh08 wrote:

You're right. The drivers for the GeForce 8800 GT aren't optimized to work with core imaging in OSX, so even though it's a beefy card, it's performance ends up being pretty poor in applications that rely heavily on core imaging, like Motion. (It does do pretty well in games though...)

The best cards for Motion are offerings that come from ATI. First up, and the one I've had the most experience with, is the Radeon X1900 XT. It comes with 512MB RAM (very important with Motion. Apple says to have a minimum of 128, but the more the better), takes up the space of two slots and has a dedicated fan on the card. It retails for around $400.
A comparable, smaller, and cheaper card that in some cases beats the X1900 in testing (I've yet to use it myself) is the
ATI Radeon HD 3870 PC & Mac Edition, also with 512 MB of RAM. However, it retails for about $220, depending on where you go.
I'm taking my speed comparisons from the tests performed by BareFeats (www.barefeats.com/harper16.html) so feel free to look into it to see how other cards compare.