I use ffdshow which is very cpu intensive but also produces flawless video. Therefore I'm wondering if I should just get a cheap card or go for hardware acceleration. Opnions?
Thats a good question. I've not seen a comprehensive review done of ffdshow vs purevideo or AVIVO.
For DVD's, AVIVO took the upper hand by a large margin over Purevideo and all but the highest end standalone products...very impressive.
For HD MPEG2 and other formats that would require hardware acceleration like WMV HD, H264 and other MPEG4 based compression, I've not seen any kind of comprehensive, side by side comparison. I know its possible to achieve steller results with most modern cards and a somewhat powerful CPU with the exception of HD H264.
I know I've had issues with h264 harware acceleration with my x1800 cards using the cyberlink decoders, so they are certainly not ready for primetime at this point. They've been very good with their decoders to this point, so I expect that to improve. It will be definately interesting to see how Nvidia's purevideo performance/solution will be, it does sound to be impressive, especially on lower end cards, which would be of interest to the HTPC enthusiast.
For hardware, the 10 bit color of ATI's new cards are something you can not take full advantage of at this point, but the Xilleon TV encoder for analog TV-out is the same they use on the STB's, so if TV out is important, that could be something to consider.
Same with 2xDual Link DVI on ATI's top cards, if you need it, its unmatched, if you don't...its unnecissary, but perhaps more flexible going forward. The top Nvidia cards run cooler/quieter than the top ATI cards out of the box..also a consideration.