any radeon after 8500 & any nvidia after the 7xxx series all have some type of hardware acceleration. The older ones accelerate specific codecs but the newer ones accelerate a lot.

Thx. Looks like a trip to Fry's tomorrow is in order :)

"Vegas doesn't care about display hardware"

"if a beefier display adapter will improve full-screen playback in Vegas"

I'm just curious why both of these appeared in the same post. Wouldn't the first statement indicate that the answer to the second is, "No"?

Well, Vegas does not care about hardware, but Windows does.

I'm assuming that scaled playback should improve (in any app) with a better display adapter if the adapter can draw the screen quicker than a lesser adapter can..

I'm a bit confused by what you are getting at here. The video adapter/ OS video driver may not be the limiting factor in the display speed/smoothness of video playback. It could also be limited by the software that is being used to do the playback, or the CPU or even the hard drive system. My experience is that video adapter upgrades will do very little to improve playback speeds, unless you are using a five year old video card.

Or in cases where you are doing one very specific thing, such as streaming MPEG data from a dvd to the screen. Cards with an MPEG decoded built in will help keep the playback smooth, but usually only if you use the player software provided by the card manuafacturer.

Most of the time Fry's has a great selection, but poor prices, a sale can be good though, but their rebates are a scam.
They seldom pay the rebates no matter how carefully you fill out the form.
Let the buyer beware, but I shop Fry's as a last resort. Something I have caught my local Fry's doing is to put lower prices on the merchandise home and then charging you more at the cash register, when you bring this to their attention they will stall you and change the price on the home and infer that you lied. This has happened to me about 4 times now and so I have to believe it is part of a scam on their part.
Let the buyer beware

Just FYI -

I got a Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT and I'm not noticing any improvement in video playback.

You'll only notice it in media players that support acceleration with the GPU. It's hard to notice any more because it's done so often. IE years ago I could run HD on my AMD XP 1800 with my ATI 9600 while others with newer,faster computer always stuttered.

I have made many purchases at Fry's, including many with rebates, and I have always gotten the check a few weeks later. They are not a scam!

Now, here's an example of a video card that will improve performance in an NLE:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_cx_us.html

But the nVidia Quadro CX (which appears to be a glorified GTX 260) uses the CUDA interface, which allows the use of the GPU shaders as processors for rendering, etc., taking the load off of the CPU. Unfortunately, "normal" nVidia video cards will supposedly not work the same way and further, only Adobe CS4 products will take advantage of the Quadro CX and it's special features.

They most definitely scam their customers in Washington state and I no longer buy on their rebates. I have purchased maybe 15 items with rebates, I got one rebate check and putting lower prices on the merchandise home and then charging more at the cash register has happened 4 times to me, the last time with a witness.
I am very close to filing a complaint with the Washington State Atny General.
I say let the buyer beware and no doubt is another reason why Frys reputation is so poor and they have poor ratings