Santa Clara (CA) – GPU acceleration is one of the most significant trends in today hardware industry, opening the doors to an entirely new class of software. It appears that the next Photoshop will be one of the first mainstream applications that will tap into the GPU for a speed up. And, at least from what we have seen during a first demonstration, the progress is simply stunning.We have been saying it for a while now, mainstream applications need GPU acceleration to ring in the next major evolutionary step in software development. Far too long we have been stuck in a cycle of programming that relies on increasing clock-speeds, brings acceleration with new CPUs and a slow-down with new software releases. Even if Photoshop supports multi-core CPUs, it is one of those applications that always are very time intensive to use and especially if you are a professional user and work with huge images, then you are very familiar with “The Great Wait”, which typically describes the time lost when opening a big file or when applying a filter.
But there appears to be a very effective solution on the horizon, a solution that is most likely more effective than anything else we have seen before and in our experience using Photoshop over the past 14 years. During a demonstration at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, we got a glimpse of Adobe’s "Creative Suite Next" (or CS4), code-named “Stonehenge”, which adds GPU and physics support to its existing multi-core support.
So, what can you do with general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) acceleration in Photoshop? We saw the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core Skulltrail system. Changes made through image zoom and through a new rotate canvas tool were applied almost instantly. Another impressive feature was the import of a 3D model into Photoshop, adding text and paint on a 3D surface and having that surface directly rendered with the 3D models' reflection map.
There was also a quick demo of a Photoshop 3D accelerated panorama, which is one of the most time-consuming tasks within Photoshop these days. The usability provided through the acceleration capabilities is enormous and we are sure that digital artists will appreciate the ability to work inside a spherical image and fix any artifacts on-the-fly.
According to information we were given, all of these new features are part of the next-gen Photoshop, which should be a part of the “CS Next” suite. The package is expected to be released on October 1.
I definitely feel this is a great and logical step, however everyone knows Mac's are not known for their high end GPU's in most of their standard configurations.
Sure, you can upgrade your GPU, but up until this point I never had to do so.
Then again even though I use Photoshop daily, it is not for print, and I avoid using filters like the plague, but still it sounds as if the affect on things will be across the board.
Looks like in one small regard, my times, they are a changing... And it appears without any doubt for the better.
This almost feels like a "Plan B" move to me. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong.
This almost feels like a "Plan B" move to me. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong.
Right now in CS3, while you're working on an image, the GPU doesn't need to do anything but display it, so it's mostly just sitting there. Operations are CPU bound. We offload some of that work to the GPU for a couple reasons. First, the GPU is incredibly good at it, since it is highly optimized for this type of processing. Second, this frees up a lot of CPU time to do things the GPU can't or won't.
Trustworthy?
Sorry, it was time for my Adobe rant.
Sorry, it was time for my Adobe rant.
And yet, if you've ever had the curse of needing to use their InDesign SDKs, you'd wonder if more engineers and more employees is really the case... Adobe must hate their developers- big time.
i dont use or cant even afford photoshop
but its good to see software making use of a gpu
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/05/oct_1.html
As for the Mac GPUs, the only issue I'd see is the MacBook / mini line with their weak integrated Intel chipset. And Apple has already failed to certify those machines for Final Cut Studio as a result. But even there, the trend is toward integrated GPUs possibly being even faster than "dedicated" chips down the road. So there's definitely a lot more coming on your GPU.
"I didn't say anything about schedule. In fact, I never said that any of this stuff is promised to go into any particular version of Photoshop. Rather, as with previous installments, it's a technology demonstration of some things we've got cooking--nothing more."
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