Hot Hardware by Chris Connolly

Adobe, the software development powerhouse behind Photoshop, Premiere, and dozens of other content creation suites, has finally embraced the power of the GPU. Amazingly, until Adobe's CS4 suite of graphics software came out this year, the company which has nearly built their empire on graphics related software, relied entirely on the system's CPU for processing. Despite major advances in the performance and infrastructure which surrounds the GPU market, Adobe's software was never written to take advantage of the newer programmable hardware. No matter how fast of a graphics card you had, nothing would make Adobe software run faster than higher clocked processors, more memory, or faster hard disks. Until now, the graphics card has been completely secondary in the Adobe world with the exception of a few custom filters, only being used for display output rather than using the graphics processor for its intended purpose, accelerating on-screen graphics.

applications in Adobe's new CS4 suite, specifically Photoshop, After Effects, Acrobat, Premiere, and Bridge, are now supporting GPU acceleration. Now, adding GPU acceleration to the mix is not a cure-all for performance, and suddenly doesn't throw all of the graphics processing on to the GPU. These applications, as system intensive as they are, are still programs which work and live in a 2D world; there is very little true 3D interaction in these programs, which is typically where GPUs thrive. However, through the use of OpenGL, Adobe can effectively use your system's GPU to accelerate some 2D drawings on-screen.  read more...