Time for a new Mac or just a new graphics card?

My dual core Mac Pro is getting sluggish with Motion.  I was thinking of picking up a new iMac and loading it up with RAM but after reading a bit about the importance of graphics cards in Motion (Spencer's article is linked below) and the benefits of RAM dwindling once you're above 4 GB, I'm not so sure.
http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/smartin/story/gettingthe_most_out_ofmotion/
Right now I have the ATY,RadeonX1900, 512 MB installed.  I'm processing with a dual core Xeon 2x2.66 GHz and 9GB of RAM.
So I'm curious.  Would my outdated processor be fast enough to keep up with heavy motion graphics work in Motion 4, if I installed a great graphics card.  That would really save me a lot of money.  Or is it just time to bite the bullet and update my machine? 
I see that with the new iMac the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 seems to be the top of the line card.  Anyone know how it performs in Motion?
Your suggestions are greatly appreciated,
Art

You are quite limited with the old first generation Mac Pros because of the PCIe 1.0 slots. You can replace that ATI 1900 with an ATI 5780, but most of the real benefit of the GPU is lost because of the older slots in your model. However, the card you now have is quite outdated, tends to run very hot, and has been troublesome for many users who have or had the ATI 1900.
Snow Leopard as well as Lion have full support for the ATI 5770 and 5780, both of which can be ordered from Apple's Online Store. You must purchase the Apple versions of these cards.
If you wish to spend the money then the only other option from Apple is tne Nvidia Quadra card. However, lacking PCIe 2.0 slots it doesn't seem to make sense to spend so much on a card that cannot achieve its potential.

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