Back in August, Windows 7 overtook Windows XP in terms of market share according to statistics researcher Net Applications. If you're still among the 42.52 percent that's running the 11 year old operating system and looking forward to Adobe Photoshop CS7, you're out of luck. Tom Hogarty, product manager for Adobe, announced that Photoshop CS6 will be the last major version to support Windows XP. The next version of Photoshop will require Windows 7 or later.
It's not clear whether Adobe will restrict users from installing the next Photoshop version on XP, or that it's just not supported. Adobe already dropped support for Windows Vista with Photoshop CS6, although users are not restricted from installing and running the graphics editing program on XP's successor. However the company kept supporting Windows XP, because more users were on XP than Vista when Photoshop CS6 was released.
In his blog post, Hogarty silently states that Windows XP can no longer provide the performance needed to power Photoshop: XP is not modern enough. The next version will make much more use of GPU acceleration, a trend Adobe started with Photoshop CS4. The Photoshop team suggests to begin planning your upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 if you want to "take advantage of future Photoshop innovations".
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