Best Graphics card for HD video Editing

For video editing you will surely need the CUDA technology......so you'll have to do with a NVIDIA GPU>>the GTX 470 is more apropriate for video editing...

and yes CUDA have significant effect on quite any things!!

you can also use Super LoiLoScope Mars or TMPGEnc Xpress

Here is a review someone sent me.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/newsfeed.asp?nid=4960

This goes through both ATI and Nvidia Cards.

Professional and gaming.

A single "simple" video card like an 8400GS or an HD 5750 is more than enough for video editing. You don't need CUDA unless you will specifically use a video editing program than utilizes CUDA and most don't.

You won't need SLI or Crossfire. Why introduce extra heat or power issues when video editing is all about CPU horsepower.

I use two different PCs just for video editing, one with a Q9400 and one with an AMD hexacore Thiuban 1055T. The Q9400 has the simple 8400GS videocard (no fan) and the AMD has the 5750 and both cards are more than enough to hook up 2 two monitors to each.

Ah well I currently use the HD4850 which has 512MB onboard memory, unfortunately Looks unloads a lot of work onto the GPU and uses up a significant amount of memory, I've been advised that at least 1Gb is necessary. I was thinking that the 5850 Toxic 2GB would be terrific, but perhaps CUDA would add more (with only 1.28GB onboard) than a non CUDA card with more memory.

Thanks for the comments btw guys this is really helpful  

Oh yes and sorry, the 4850 isn't enough, it can't handle 1920x1080 with a decent playback framerate for editing, it's quite slow. So no, a "simple" graphics card is not enough to handle this. I use AVCHD but convert it to a more manageable format first.

Looks is a specific case and a bit buggy to say the least being very poorly coded for OGL acceleration, this has been an issue since about 2008, and one when you had to trade off better quality in ATi or Matrox for better speed in the Geforce cards.

Things have improved somewhat (be sure to update your drivers for either ATi or nV), but right now the way it handles transforms it is still slower on the ATi cards than on nVidia. If you use Looks on an regular basis that will be an issue, for others like Boris, it's the other way around.

d_95 is a little myopically simplistic, although in your case the nV card would be better, but that's not always the case, not by a long shot, especially as they move to more universal acceleration like OpenCL and Direct Compute which greatly favour ATi for video editing, especially with a little help from SAD (Sum of Absolute Diff) transform math added to the shaders.

Since you already have an HD4850, then it doesn't make as much sense to move to another ATi card than it would to move to an nV card simply because you can easily fall-back should you change the apps you use, and the card you have is already pretty powerful for thos apps that do offer global acceleration. You will likely find the nV card better in some things like MB Looks and the ATi better in others.

Sorry. Not familiar with Looks. I use Pinnacle Studio HD, version 14 which doesn't take advantage of a high end GPU. Interestingly, the 8400GS is hooked up to a 24" monitor that I use to edit in full HD and I haven't noticed any lag.