Over the past few months, we have seen previews of some GPU-accelerated Adobe effects at events being held by both NVIDIA and AMD / ATI. Today, however, NVIDIA launched a website showcasing many more of the GPU-accelerated aspects of Adobe's upcoming Creative Suite 4, due out some time in October.
According to NVIDIA, "Adobe is the latest in a trend of visual computing companies grabbing on to the massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs for more than just rendering pixels to the screen. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the most important addition to this trend because of its market position as the leading artistic tool suite.
With NVIDIA GPU acceleration, Adobe Creative Suite 4 enables a faster, more natural way of working with images, while improving quality and productivity. A GPU will allow users to interact with their images and videos in a way that is not possible without a GPU."
The effects on the workspace in the various Adobe applications that are accelerated by the GPU are subtle, becuase the workspace looks similar enough, yet dramatic due to the fluid movements when in use. Whereas some of the features produce choppy movements and jumpy zooms when processed on the CPU, they are fluid and smooth on the GPU. We have a few short videos posted to show you what we mean...
Adobe Photoshop CS4:
Adobe Photoshop CS4 uses NVIDIA Quadro or GeForce GPUs to create a digital canvas that is interactive in ways that are simply not possible without a GPU. NVIDIA GPUs enable real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, and make changes to the view instantaneous and smooth. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also taps the GPU for 2D and 3D compositing and high-quality antialiasing, making jagged edges of text and objects a thing of the past. Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, and color conversion are also accelerated by the GPU.
