Photoshop to get GPU and physics acceleration

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shadow2get

In the zone
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Santa Clara (CA) – GPU acceleration is one of the most significant trends in today hardware industry, opening the doors to an entirely class of software running desktop. What will be possible is fascinating to see on a monitor, nut it is not tangible, if you just hear about it. 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.

*www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/adobe/pshopcs4.jpg

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.
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gxsaurav

gxsaurav

You gave been GXified
Adobe Acrobat already has this, & now Photoshop, cool....

All thanks to Microsoft, DirectX & WPF. GPU acceleration was already there in Mac OS X in form of Quartz since 2002 & in somewhat in Linux but it now only with Aero & WPF that all componies are going the GPU accelerated way.
 
Krazy_About_Technology

Krazy_About_Technology

Padawan
gx_saurav said:
Adobe Acrobat already has this, & now Photoshop, cool....

All thanks to Microsoft, DirectX & WPF. GPU acceleration was already there in Mac OS X in form of Quartz since 2002 & in somewhat in Linux but it now only with Aero & WPF that all componies are going the GPU accelerated way.
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Saurav, u sure WPF is gonna be used in photoshop? I mean Direct X is obivious but WPF?
 
gxsaurav

gxsaurav

You gave been GXified
Photoshop has it's own Image engine, if they go the WPF way then have to use the Microsoft Image Engine which obviously Adobe won't use.

What they can do is to create a mix between a photoshop UI of WPF & engine of Adobe
 
gxsaurav

gxsaurav

You gave been GXified
^^^^ It is GUI. Adobe can very well make the UI of Photsohop in WPF which will be GPU accelerated.

If they make the image engine in WPF then even that will be GPU accelerated but it will Microsoft Image Engine which Adobe should not use. The obvious reason for which Adobe is bringing GPGPU is that they can provide the GPU acceleration in there own Image Engine & use the GPU to simply do math calculation for acceleration.

Now bring GPGPU to After Effect, Premiere Pro & tell Autodesk to bring GPGPU to 3Ds Max & Autocad, Toxic & Combustion & witness 3 fold performance increse in every project. A GPU has more calculation ability then a CPU these days, even my Radeon 3650 can easily trump my Core 2 Duo E6550 in pure Gigaflop calculation.
 
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