ATI Radeon x1600xt or nVidia 7300GT or GMA 950? Which is better?

[EHUnlucky7x9@ao]

I'm going to be making a purchase today at the Apple Store at 5pm EST. I need to do this ONE THING.... have iDVD STOP CRASHING. So i'm going to buy a new Mac.

Which one is better for a speedy encoding?

I took my 1hr and 30 min iMovie project, sent it to iDVD, crashes. Crashed on my 1.6 G5 and my friend's 2.0Ghz Macbook. Rendering video on the Macbook was fast for the menu assets and slideshow...but my 1.6 G5 encoded the 1 1/2 hour video faster than the Macbook.

I thought ENCODING was done all through the processor, but after seeing it yesterday, I have reason to believe that the GPU has a role in the encoding process. I know the 950 GMA sux, but why?

For those who really know, please let me know which GPU is best and Why. Thanks.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Do you game? if so stay away from the $5.00 GMA graphics, its the cheapist thing you can get in graphics that should tell you. Real graphics chips are in another league.

 

[BlizzardBomb]

I'm pretty sure iMovie and iDVD are CPU dependant. A stronger GPU makes pretty much zero difference.

 

[EHUnlucky7x9@ao]

Yeah... I wasn't really thinking about getting the GMA 950 either. I only play an occasional Halo game. It runs fine on my FX5200 card on my 1.6 G5....but I dunno how that game will play on a Macbook...

Anways... yeah... I had thought iDVD and iMovie ran better with faster CPU's... which they did when it came to encoding the menus and the slideshows in iDVD. But when it came to encoding the movie itself, the stock black macbook encoded the video, it was from 4pm and it finished at 830pm yesterday. Whereas my Powermac G5 encoded the menus slow and encoded the video from 12am-3:30am. (Yes I stay up because i wanted to see if the program would freeze when it came to encoding the audio...and it did)

Has anyone used iDVD and burned a movie on it with no problems?! It's been 3 years since I made a DVD on iDVD. Last version i used was iDVD 3. The past 3 years i made DVD's with DVD Studio Pro. But since this video I have to put on iDVD was suppose to be a quick 1 day build.... i opted to use iDVD. But now i'm on day 9 with this problem...

 

[Super Macho Man]

The G5 is faster at iDVD encoding because the G5 chip has an Altivec unit and a strong FPU, not because of any GPU. Apple has optimized iDVD for Altivec from the first days of the G4, but probably haven't spent as much time on SSE3. If your iDVD project crashes on more than one computer, and it happens at the same point every time, that suggests a problem with iDVD or the iDVD project or one of the assets in the project, not the computer.