what sort of 'hi-def' clips are you talking about?

no nle is going to breeze through fx / titles, etc., unless they're fairly simple and your pc is upto it.

graphic cards are pretty irrelevant to vegas since it doesn't use gpu....

"graphic cards are pretty irrelevant to vegas since it doesn't use gpu...."

Interesting point because i USED to think hardware acceleration was the way to go. But now that I have a cuda video card and PP CS4 (which is hardware accelerated) I'm amazed to see how LITTLE things have improved. The time line plays a LITTLE smoother, but once you start piling on the effects, your right back in the same "jerky" boat again.... all that money spent to see so little gain.

I'm now beginning to think that Vegas is on the right track with this dynamic ram idea, and would like to this taken to the next level some how. The use of dynamic ram is about as equal to actually rendering out the effect and playing it back that way.... as you're going to get. Maybe even a combination of dynamic ram and hardware acceleration but I now at least know that hardware acceleration isn't the answer all on its own.

Sony is on the right track so far that in a few years when 8+ cores become more common in mid to high end computers, and we (hopefully) leave 32 bit Windows and it's limitations (specifically 3.5GB ram) behind, the CPU-only approach will remain a better solution, as the time won using the GPU will be wasted on the extra time spent on sending data back and forth between the CPU and the GPU.

That is for playback and editing.

For rendering, I would not mind a bit of hardware assistance with h.264.

"The use of dynamic ram is about as equal to actually rendering out the effect and playing it back that way"

It's not about equal, that is exactly what you're doing except it's stored in RAM instead of a file.
One way to make it better is having the option to save what's in RAM to a file and have the application know it's there. You've probably noted that After Effects has this capability. Adding this to Vegas would significantly improve its functionality as an editor.
There's other tricks that other apps use however they must be complex to code and hence the software is quite expensive and you need fast disk arrays to gain any benefit. Implementing this in Vegas would price it way out of its current market segment.

Bob.

"You've probably noted that After Effects has this capability."

To be honest Bob, I haven't gotten to that point yet... still learning the ins/outs of PP (What a stupidly awkward program compared to Vegas I'll tell ya!) But yeah.... an improvement like that would be very much welcomed. Ram is cheap these days compared to other methods like Hard accel. and it does a much better job. If you could dump the memory to file in an efficient manor (once your satisfied with what you're seeing) while moving onto the next effect that would be a real time saver. In any event, I'm a little disappointed in depths of hardware acceleration relative to the money spent on it. It alone is not the answer... and good ole "shift b" is the only REAL way of seeing a more complicated effect at full frame rate.