If you want to play games, any games, forget about the Matrox cards. If you want 2D, the current crop of cards are just about equal. Sure, some scroll tests or other component tests may be a bit faster on one card, but it's nothing that will make or break a card. Besides, *ALL* future 2D development will be using a 3D engine. 2D engines stopped being improved a while back already. Apple has switched over to an accelerated (3D-engine driven) window manager in their latest OS X and Microsoft will be doing the same thing.

I'm biased, I'll say it right now. But the two games in town are really ATI and NVIDIA. Doesn't really matter how you look at it.

Firewire... Firewire (IEEE1394) is a peripheral BUS. You can connect any number of un-related devices using it. It's important to know the difference between using firewire for DV with a DV camcorder and using it with some other multimedia capture device (taking analog input for instance). In both cases the external device will be responsible for capturing your video and encoding it. The stream will then be sent to the computer through the firewire port. In the case of using a DV camera (Sony, JVC, etc...) you can record to DV tape and then transfer your recordings onto the computer for editing. If you're going to transfer the entire stream, it wouldn't really matter if it was done in real time or not.

If capturing directly onto the computer's drive, the bus has to be fast enough to move all the captured data as its being created. Likewise, the capture device has to be able to encode it fast enough and small enough to stuff it through the bus and onto your machine to be able to keep up with continual recording. This is why a USB solution is bad. USB is pretty slow (12mbit/s max, specific speed for capture device class you'll have to look up) so the captured video has to be a combination of the following: a fairly low resolution, highly compressed and low frame rate. With firewire you have a maximum throughput of about 400mbit/s to choke up before you're in trouble.

Capturing with a quality DV camera is going to give you better results than capturing with an analog camera and then using a $100 device to capture and encode your video. The DV camera isn't cheap. But all you need on the computer side is a firewire port. A PCI firewire card can be bought for $30. Just make sure that for the most versatile use, you get something that is fully powered (6 pins per port) - that will let you use bus-powered hard drive enclosures with it.

If you're going to go with an analog solution, you'll still need an analog camera (or other video source if you're not going to be making your own) and at least a capture device. If the capture device is firewire, then you'll also need the firewire port mentioned above. Firewire, is not faster than PCI. So if all you want is analog, you may as well get a PCI solution as long as the capture quality matches your requirements (this is going to depend on the capture codec being used, the quality of the parts used in each product as well as the sophistication of the capture driver/software).

There are a large number of products available to suit a very wide range of requirements. I think the first thing to do is note down what requirements you have right now for video and those which you think you'll have in the short term. Then go through and look at everything that will fit those specifications. Might as well look at solutions that will allow you to expand your requirements in the future as well. After that you can start comparing them (or asking for opinions) and narrow it down - you'll probably be looking at price here too.

If you just want something to connect a camera to and make decent captures that you can resample and post-compress for the web, then you can get something relatively cheap. Even with a TV tuner on board, the ATI PCI TV Wonder card is pretty cheap for instance. But as has been said, at some point it might just be worth sticking with an All In Wonder if it will come out cheaper than two cards.

Bruno