Comments

epirb wrote on 9/7/2004, 4:32 PM
No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I'm curiuos too, is this something that one should seriously look for if buying a new computer say before the end of the year. Or will AGP still be fine.
Not strictly from a Vegas point of view, but overall. Exculding Gaming
rs170a wrote on 9/7/2004, 5:33 PM
There's an interesting article on the Digital Producer site titled The Promise of PCI Express that may answer some of your questions.

Mike
rmack350 wrote on 9/7/2004, 10:03 PM
The article that Mike linked to says a lot while saying very little.

Start with the prices of the cards. The top end ATI card is about $800.00. The price for the 3d Labs card wasn't listed. Nvidia licenses their GPUs to card manufacturers so you might well see a custom card based on one of their chips.

The company reps mentioned HD but didn't really say much. Maybe their products will be aimed at 3d rendering at HD resolutions.

We may see some pricey specialty cards aimed at the lower end of the video editing market. Probably the cards will range from the price of an All-in Wonder card up to several thousand dollars.

The advantage of PCI-e x16 graphics cards is that they have equally high throughput coming back to the CPU form the card as they do going out to the card. This means the card could do some processing and quickly return the results to the system instead of just out to a monitor.

There is also a proposed PCI-e 32x slot. More throughput than what is used for a graphics card. Will we see high end cards for HD video in this slot? I don't know.

There was a recent article about an audio software startup that was writing audio plugins that could use the nvidia GPU for processing audio. So that says something about the potential of using a graphics card as a co-processor.

So, should you run out and buy a motherboard with a PCI-e 16x slot? If you can wait, you should stand pat for a while. This is very new technology and some motherboard manufacturers had to recall some boards at the get-go. By next NAB you'll probably see lots of products and maybe even Vegas will get some hardware benefit out of it all.

If you have to buy a motherboard now and don't plan to upgrade for at least a year then you might want to consider a PCI-Express based board. Just buy an inexpensive graphics card. And do a lot of homework. PCI-E x16 graphics cards can be real power hogs. So can the Intel CPUs you'll end up using.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 9/7/2004, 11:09 PM
The new AGP cards don't excite me that much. However the potential for other kinds of cards such as 10 bit HD capture cards does. Currently these need PCI X and expensive disk arrays. PCI E may be able to deliver a cheaper solution.

Bob.

PS the HD cards themselves will still cost zilllions.