Radeon 2600 beats GeForce 8800 -- again

I was doing some tests comparing two iMacs, one with the Radeon 2600 Pro and one with the GeForce 8800 GS. The test was to import a movie file into iMovie, which renders thumbnails of each segment of the video.
The iMac with the Radeon completed the thumbnails faster even though it had a slower CPU clock (2.8 vs 3.06GHz). Huh?
The same thing happened when I encoded a DVD project into a disk image using iDVD. This required it to render an animated welcome screen. The iMac 2.8 with Radeon 2600 Pro beat the iMac 3.08 with the GeForce 8800 GS!
Scratching my head, I decided to try the same two tests on a Mac Pro 3.2GHz 8-core. When the Radeon 2600 XT was installed, the Mac Pro completed the iMovie and iDVD tests faster than when the GeForce 8800 GT was installed.
Apparently the GPU is handling at least a portion of both tasks -- and the Radeon 2600 handles its portion better than the GeForce 8800. And to add insult to injury, the Radeon 3870 will be shipping within a week.
Message was edited by: rob_ART to correct spelling.

Thanks for the information. I am considering to replace my standard mac pro first generation video card by a ge force 8800.
I am using the mac pro mainly for D 200 raw file editing on 30 inch ACD screen. I jjust wondered if yoyr results are also applicable for my situation.
Any comments
Iemke

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