I have been doing alot of reading on Nvidia's cuda based program badaboom media converter. I was pretty much sold on buying an Nvidia card for this purpose as well as some light gaming. A few days ago I read that ATI has been working with Cyberlink to be able to do the same thing as Nvidia and badaboom. The latest version of Cyberlink Powerdirector 7 ultra has support for an ATI hd4850 and accelerated video encoding/transcoding. My question is what would be a better buy a 9600gt for $160aud or a 8800gs oc version for $119aud for Nvidia or getting a hd4850 for $235aud? My current system is: Q6600 running at 3.2, 4 gigs of ram, gigabyte x38 ds5, ati hd2600xt 512mb. I do alot of video editing and encoding and ocassionaly some gaming. I have a 22" lcd screen and like to play at native resolution and 1400x900 at the worst. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Because of the gaming / monitor I'd suggest get the 4850 and wait for ATI/Cyberlink.

thats the what I have been thinking, but its hard to look past the 8800gs for $119 its the Asus 8800gs top version. I do like to play games, but its not at the top of my priority list. I think if I were buying for a bit of future proofness the 4850 is def. the go.

Well there was a report under Toms news section that Nvidia will be supporting DX10.1 so it seems that they have been unsuccessful in trying to ignore it and have been forced to adopt it. This means that games will now almost certainly adopt it sooner rather than later. This can only be good for people with DX10.1 capable cards from ATI.
Mactronix

The only thing that worries me about the 4850 is the temps. Is that gonna be a big issue?

Doubtful. They are designed to operate at those temps so...

ati has released a software 2 convert media files using GPU and i hear they are faster. hd4850 is a beta choice as it it beta for games. ig u increase the fan speed of ur ati card either by editing catalyst profile or by ati tools.....temp should be fine.....i hear 60% fan speed get the temp down to less den 50 in ideal and not more than 65 on load

what software besides the cyberlink solution has ATI released? I am very keen on the GPU encoding thing.

I read that the ATI software, I think it was called Avivo, didn't actually use the GPU at all and that someone had cracked it and used it on Nvidia hardware as well. Does anyone know for sure if the cyberlink software is using that same thing or if its new?

http://www.cyberlink.com/eng/press_room/view_1756.html
if you go to this link it talks about the hd4850 and gpu accelerated transcoding.

yes you can do it with Avivo right back to the 1800xt

How much difference do those things make? Does it even make a dent on overall time considering encoding is cpu based?

well yes encoding has been cpu intensive in the past, but now both nvidia and ati have developed ways to use the gpu inline with the cpu to drastically speed up encoding times. this technology is newer than avivo it will only work with the 4800 series due to uvd2(universal video decoder2).

But how much of a dent does it make? Most modern encoders scale almost linerally, which means quad core is basically twice as fast as dual. And with Nehalem on the way, whose performance model use 8 cores with ht for 16 threads, will gpu even matter?

If u read up on nvidia's cuda technology and ati's technology they are claiming up to 18x faster than the fastest quad. just do a search on accelerated video transcoding or GPGPU and u will find out more. Tom's and many other websites have had storys on this.