Which graphics card should I choose?

I am finally going to get a new Mac next month when Leopard is released, after 4 years of wonderful performance by my "old reliable" MDD G4. But with all the new apps from Adobe, and a lot of the new apps from other companies, the old girl is getting long in the tooth and is getting slower and slower. The beach ball is my constant companion.
I do a lot of illustration work and my file sizes range up to 500 MB or so. They average around 150MB. Most are high resolution multi-layer psd files. Anyway, I was wondering if I need to spend the extra money for the ATI Radeon X1900 XT. I am not a gamer, although I do occasional video editing (mainly as a hobby) in Final Cut Express. Any advice/suggestions appreciated.

Thanks Bud, now we can close the topic with your ultra minimalistic post..the circus is complete now
BTW more memory does not change the video performances in some cases; the main memory is used from the processor, not from the video card anymore; that's the reason why the modern video card comes with 512 Mb of ddr3 ram or more; if the application is old it will try to drive the memory on board instead of the one on the video card, so from your point of view it would be irrilevant to have more or less memory; but for sure you wanna have the best amount of ram on your video card; and at this point ATi is the way to go, also because the video chip is a level higher than the Nvidia chip.
I use 3d applications, so i need a lot of memory because when i render is the main processor that do the job, not the video card (that displays the preview and the interface of the application), so in cases like this (and like when you use audio/video applications like adobe or final cut or stuff like that) you want to have a lot of memory, even if is not used by the process due the memory allocation problems, for one single reason: if you load a couple of images or movies in an applicaiton, it is copied in RAM to speed up the process, so even if the program itself can drive only 2 GB, the process goes faster because teh entire material is stored in memory (but treated based on how much data can be handled from the software).
sorry, had to do the clown show once more (now let me get my masks and leave the stage LOL)
Message was edited by: darshie76

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Which graphics card should I buy

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Which of these cards gives me the most performance for the money?
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 1792MB PhysX CUDA
Or
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Regards
Mikael

I just found this at Red Giant home page, I guess I was not wrong after all.
Rendering
In most cases, the Looks plug-in requires rendering to generate final color-corrected output. With host applications like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, you can use Looks as a real-time color correction effect with the dynamic playback capabilities. With applications such as Apple Motion and Adobe After Effects, rendering is required to generate any output with Looks applied. In general, the faster the graphics card, the faster the rendering of media. NVIDIA cards are generally faster than ATI cards of the same level for HD or HDV projects."
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The ATI X1900XT beats the QuadroFX in some (few) game benchmarks, actually.
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Which graphics card should I choose?

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