VIDEO: Adobe introduces GPU acceleration to Creative Suite 4

Posted at: 5:06pm 24th September 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

GPGPU comes of age as the latest version of Photoshop supports OpenGL to allow GPU acceleration on any Shader Model 3.0 GPU. Meanwhile, After Effects and Premiere CS4 allow extra features on Nvidia Quadro GPUs

GPGPU computing has just taken a major step into the world of mainstream software development, as Adobe has now released a GPU-accelerated version of its Creative Suite 4, comprising Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Both Premiere Pro and After Effects only support GPU features on Nvidia’s Quadro GPUs, but Photoshop CS4 allows GPU acceleration on any mainstream Shader Model 3.0 GPU. Built on OpenGL, Photoshop CS4's GPU features allow real-time rotation of images and accelerated zooming and panning. As well as this, Photoshop CS4 also uses the GPU for anti-aliasing on text and objects, and it can tap the GPU for brushstroke previews, HDR tone mapping and colour conversion.

The difference is quite impressive to anyone who’s used to Photoshop, particularly with regards to the smooth zooming and panning features, which will make light work of image editing for anyone using a pen and tablet. Adobe claims that the accelerated zoom feature will also allow you to ‘zoom all the way down to the level of individual pixels, with perfect clarity even at the oddest magnification percentages.’

Adobe developed the new Photoshop features in cooperation with Nvidia, but there’s no reason why they wouldn’t work on an AMD GPU that supports Shader Model 3.0 either. Nvidia’s vice president of product marketing, Ujesh Desai, explained to Custom PC that ‘even though it’s standard OpenGL, we didn’t care – we still wanted to do it because we felt like it would bring a better experience to the end user… we believe that you should get a better experience and we’re going to devote engineering resources to make that happen, even if it helps the competition.’

That said, Desai, claimed there would be benefits to using an Nvidia GPU, explaining that ‘the fact that we’ve been working with Adobe for the last three to four years is a testament to our engineers.’  He also added that he believed that ‘the fact that Adobe CS4 was developed in Nvidia GPUs from start to finish will mean that some of the optimisations they have in there are going to run better on our hardware versus the competition’s.’

Interestingly, Nvidia is also planning to extend the features in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 through plug-ins written in its own CUDA language, rather than OpenGL. ‘Because CS4 has this plug-in architecture,’ says Desai, ‘you’re going to see us do some really cool things with CUDA that will extend it even further.’ As Desai points out, though, ‘our competition has chosen not to support CUDA.’ An example of a future plug-in comes from Elemental Technologies, which brought us the CUDA-based Badaboom video encoder. Elemental’s new plug-in for Premiere Pro is designed to allow real-time encoding of HD video.

You can see several videos of Photoshop CS4 with GPU acceleration enabled and disabled on the next page.