"Once Washington made the Middle East tremble – now no one there takes it seriously"

A "must read" article from the UK

Watershed. It’s the only word for it. Once Lebanon and Syria and Egypt trembled when Washington spoke. Now they laugh. It’s not just a question of what happened to the statesmen of the past. No one believed that Cameron was Churchill or that the silly man in the White House was Roosevelt – although Putin might make a rather good Stalin. It’s more a question of credibility; no one in the Middle East takes America seriously anymore. And you only had to watch Obama on Saturday to see why.

For there he was, prattling on in the most racist way about “ancient sectarian differences” in the Middle East. Since when was the president of the United States an expert on these supposed “sectarian differences”? Constantly we are shown maps of the Arab world with Shiites and Sunnis and Christians colour-coded onto the nations which we generously bequeathed to the region after the First World War. But when is an American paper going to carry a colour-coded map of Washington or Chicago with black and white areas delineated by streets?

But what was amazing was the sheer audacity of our leaders in thinking that they could yet again bamboozle their electorates with their lies and trumperies and tomfooleries.

This doesn’t mean that the Syrian regime did not use gas “on its own people” – a phrase we used to use about Saddam when we wanted a war in Iraq – but it does mean that our present leaders are now paying the price for the dishonesty of Bush and Blair ...

Adobe CS6 Mercury Graphics Engine, Mercury Playback Engine

I am confused by the required graphics hardware needed to support GPU processing by Adobe Photoshop & Premier CS-6.

Photoshop CS6 "Mercury Graphics Engine" (MGE):

My understanding is that ALL MGE functions are supported by both NVIDIA (CUDA) and AMD (OpenCL).

If this is true, then which of these cards (gaming is not a concern) would give the best PS6 performance:

NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti 448 (? 1.2GB, not clear on this) ($270)
AMD Radeon HD 6870 2GB ($220)
AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB ($160)

Premier Pro CS6 "Mercury Playback Engine" (MPE):

MPE is even more confusing. Here it seems that CUDA and OpenCL do not both offer the same support.

It seems that AMD OpenCL will NOT support these MPE effects:

Fast Blur effect
Gaussion Blur effect
Directional Blur effect
Basic 3D effect

However, I am not, in general, interested in 'special effects' on my videos!

I do now use PP4, but only do color correction, occasional sharpening or blurring, and a lot of cross-fade/cut-through-black transitions. So would MPE speed up any of these processes?

If NVIDIA chips are the only ones which support full MPE playback, does the GTX 560 do so? Looking on adobe (http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/mercury-playback-engine.edu.html) the GTX 470, 570, 580 are listed as compatible - GTX 560 is not mentioned.

Finally, what about AMD CrossFireX and Nvidia's SLI?

Do CrossFireX and SLI both support all functions of MGE and MPE?

That is, if one uses two identical (to be safe) graphics cards, will MGE & MPE both be able to take advantage of all of the GPUs?

Long and complicated post, I know - but Thanks for any help!

Incidentally, since I think it clear what my needs are (Modest budget Image and Video processing - not gaming) do any of you have other suggestions for a cost effective configuration giving the most bang-for-the-buck. I will not be building this system until W8 is out and stable with CS6.

Again, thank you for any help with this.

I have tried posting on the Adobe forums, but, with my usual luck with Adobe, the forums have been down for the past several hours.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
KEYWORDS: cs6 cs-6 master cuda opencl gpu nvidia amd crossfire crossfirex sli photoshop premier grapics video mercury mercury graphics engine, mercury_playback_engine engine playback playback_engine graphics_engine hardware support supported required graphics_processor video_processor video processor