ATI Radeon X1900 vs Nvidia Ge Force 6600

Question

I predominantly edit video, create graphics using Adobe CS2 and animate and composite using After Effects.
I currently have a Nvidia GeForce 6600, and I was wondering if the ATI Radeon X1900 will be a significant upgrade. Has anyone used both of these cards and noticed one was better than the other?
Also in system profiler the GeForce 6600 is listed as a PCI card, so this should mean that I can install the ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition?
thanks.

Answer 1

Adding additional RAM will definitely help. AE7 and higher can address up to 3 GB of RAM by itself, and this is directly related to the length of the RAM preview you can do.
If you're doing a RAM preview (or a render) in AE, open up Activity Monitor located in /Applications/Utilities. What you'll notice is that most of your CPU is not being used effectively. Nucleo & Nucleo Pro launch background instances of AE and this causes your CPUs to be fully utilized, hence the reduction in time needed to do a RAM preview or a render.
One of my favorite features is the Speculative Preview that does RAM previews in the background without the user having to invoke them. It automatically RAM previews your work area, and if you make a change to something, it throws out the frames that need to be updated and immediately starts RAM previewing the new frames. So, by the time you're ready to preview your work area, it's probably already been rendered!
The background renderer is also great. You put a composition into the render queue and Nucleo Pro starts rendering it in the background. This means that you can go back into AE and keep working on something else rather than having to wait until AE finishes rendering what's in the queue.
Take a look at the product overview in the link in my previous post so you can see if it's right for you. There's also a demo version that watermarks everything so you can get a feel for how it'll fit into your workflow.
If you decide that you don't need all the features that Nucleo Pro has, you can get the standard Nucleo which does RAM previews only for AE 7 and 6.5. If you're upgrading to AE CS3, this basic functionality is built-in, so you won't need Nucleo at all except for the additional features that Nucleo Pro offers.
In GPU accelerated programs like Motion, the memory on the video card can matter. Each element is treated as a texture and has to fit in the video card's onboard memory for best performance. If you have many elements that you're working with, it's conceivable that you'd fill up the card's memory and hurt performance. For a G5, the only available 512MB card is nVidia's QuadroFX 4500 which is incredibly expensive. It was only available as an option at the time the computer was built, so to get one now means you have to get it as a replacement part, and that'll set you back ~$1,500. Not worth it, in all but extreme cases.