OpenCL support on PC?

Question

Hello.
I'm in the middle of building a new PC and getting ready for CS6. I was pretty sure that my new gfx card would be the GXT 680 from Nvidia.
But then I saw this test: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-680-review-benchmark,3161-15.html
That shows that the new gamer cards from Nvidia is being artificially slowed down in terms of compute performance (I guess to sell more of their expencive Quadro cards)
Since I like to game as well and I don't want to pay premium price for a Quadro card, the Radeon HD 7970 started to look very sexy to me...and with the new OpenCL support, this was perfect!
But then I realized that I haven't actually seen anywhere that OpenCL support was for anything other then MAC, and maybe Adobe have some shady deal with Nvidia that prevents them from offering support on PC.
Anybody know about this?

Answer 1

There's really absolutely no reason to get bent out of shape at all over this. If you get the GTX 470 card (if you can find one), you'll be getting a card that is not only very affordable but provides every bit of power you probably need for Premiere Pro. As a gaming card, it's absolutely not terrible at all, either.
If you want a card that balances gaming and video editing capabillities (with Premiere Pro) you're going to be sacrificing something on one side or another. Yes, the chart from Tom's that you referenced does appear to show the even newer cards getting blown out of the water on compute performance but that DOES NOT take into consideration the way that Premiere Pro CS5 and later are leveraging the GPU.
And it's not an Adobe/Nvidia unholy alliance as you suggest, simply that Nvidia was at the table with Adobe years ago and they work closely together because Nvidia is invested in the workstation graphics/computing marketplace, and AMD sells gamer cards. And while Nvidia would certainly prefer that you purchase a Quadro high-end card, as far as Premiere Pro SPECIFICALLY is concerned, one of the better GTX cards will do you much better for both price and performance.
This is not an ATI/AMD versus Nvidia thing, and Adobe isn't trying to keep AMD out of the party, it has more to do with the types of GPU and the type of marketplace that each GPU manufacturer is chasing. Adobe and Nvidia working together makes sense because of what the two stand to gain mutually from their chosen market, and AMD/ATI would rather chase the much larger user base of gamers. Still, not saying that their GPUs cannot process the workload that Nvidia cards handle, just that they currently DON'T work the same way.
If you want brand loyalty and/or gaming peak performance, it sounds like you want an AMD/ATI card. If you want the best performance you can get in terms of Premiere Pro editing (and After Effects, and Photoshop) then you should take the clear advice of Harm, myself and many others, and just get a good Nvidia GTX card.
Final note....there is a reason that Tom's uses a dozen different tests when comparing computer hardware....it's because different applications process things different ways and different hardware reacts differently across the board. They cannot possibly prove out a real-world scenario for every user. Tom's did use to use Premiere Pro for baseline encoding testing, but that all is pre-2010 when CS5 launched and Premiere Pro begain heavily leveraging the GPU with Mercury Playback Engine. Tom's isn't really incentivized to run a bunch of peculiar tests for a single software package that has a relatively small user base compared to the millions of general computing, business computing and gamer setups. So take that into consideration when using Tom's guides to procure hardware for Premiere Pro CS5 and later.