Mercury Engine h.264 playback... Radeon 5770 vs a high end Nvidia card?

Hi! I'm a pro FCP user and thinking about making the switch to Premiere. I have a DSLR and I'm very interested in the Mercury Playback Engine. My searches through these forums have brought up issues about scrubbing h.264 files or even playback for extended periods of time, but all those threads are 2 years old or older.

I'm wondering if a brand new dual 2.66GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro with the installed ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card will scrub and playback h.264 files without a glitch. I've heard you "should" buy a Nvidia graphics card to properly play back native h.264 files, but again, this is all info before the 5770 came out.

Anyone have any experience with these new Macs and it's hardware with this set up?

Additionally, looking into buying a Maxtor Mini Max as my breakout/playback card, and it has expedited h.264 encoding, but I assume that has nothing to do with playback, correct?

Thanks in advance for your help!

-Aj

Hey Shane, I could not find the link to the 5770 Solution for Premiere.

thanks

Ah! Thank you both! You've been very helpful and I appreciate it. Sounds like getting an Nvidia card would be a good purchase if I'm using CS6's production suite.

And of course... Matrox... what was I was thinking? I guess the question I was getting at was would the Matrox Mini with Max option have a compounded effect on native h264 playback, since it is supposed to have that blazing fast encoder, but I'm going to guess it's mostly for external video/audio monitoring, and h264 file compression.

I'm also going to assume I can keep my ATI Radeon 5770 as my GUI card and just have the NVidia run as my GPU? Or won't they play well together? (Bear with me, I've never had to build a machine like this before and I'm pretty much a newb about this stuff.)

Thanks,
-Aj

THE GPU on the card is used for effects rendering. H.264 playback is through the software Mercury engine and wouldn't be helped by the GPU (unless effects were applied) That said, h264 runs fine on my 2010 imac with a 5850m card...though I do have to render some graphics effects before they will play back smoothly. I've noticed that some people in the forums skimp on RAM which I think affects playback dramatically. Lots of information (clearing up misinformation) about Mercury is on Adobe's site Their videos are quite good