The Power of X" – that's what we call the ability of the new generation of Matrox products to leverage the scalable power of your CPU with the explosive performance of dedicated hardware for the ultimate realtime video editing experience.

Here's why it's important… Until recently, dedicated hardware has been required at the heart of every realtime nonlinear editing system because CPUs just weren't up to the demanding task of handling video in realtime. Suddenly, with the advent of Gigahertz CPUs, editing software can be made to do some editing operations in real time, without hardware assistance, using just CPU power alone.

Today's CPUs, however, are still not powerful enough to allow software-based realtime engines to perform all the realtime operations you would typically like to do, at full quality. Compromises are necessary. Common trade-offs include working at half- or quarter-screen preview resolution, reducing the frame rate, and turning off processing-intensive filtering and antialiasing. When you're done with your last edit, you must spend the time to render your entire project to see the actual result.

Software-based editing products hold the promise of being more flexible and more scalable because as CPU speed increases, so does editing performance. On the other hand, specialized hardware excels at a number of time-consuming functions such as DV and MPEG-2 encoding and 3D effects. It also provides the necessary analog and digital inputs and outputs that are not built into your computer.

"The Power of X" takes full advantage of your CPU and harnesses the power of dedicated hardware to give you the extra edge to enhance your editing experience – at a price that is comparable or even lower than many software-only editing products.

With Matrox RT.X10, you edit like a pro today, and as computer platforms get faster in the future, you'll benefit from the scalable power of the CPU, but still be a step ahead with the extra boost you get from fully-optimized hardware.