In May, we learned that Nvidia and Adobe had teamed up to speed up the next version of Photoshop using GeForce GPUs. Nvidia shed more light on the subject today, and it turns out the two companies have implemented GPU acceleration in three upcoming apps: Photoshop CS4, Premiere CS4, and After Effects CS4.
In Photoshop CS4, Adobe uses GPU-acceleration voodoo for smooth image rotation, smooth zooming and panning, 2D and 3D compositing, high-quality antialiasing, HDR tone mapping, and color conversion. After Effects CS4 taps the GPU to apply effects like depth-of-field and turbulent noise in real time, while Premiere Pro CS4 accelerates “motion, opacity, color, and image distortion” with the GPU. Check out Photoshop CS4’s GPU-accelerated canvas rotation in action below:
Premiere Pro CS4 users with Quadro professional GPUs will also be able to grab Elemental’s RapiHD plug-in, which uses CUDA to speed up high-definition video encoding significantly. According to Nvidia, compressing a two-hour high-definition video to H.264 can take around 28 hours on a CPU, but RapiHD can cut that to just 2.5-3 hours.
With the exception of RapiHD, all of the aforementioned features require only GeForce FX or better graphics cards with 512MB of memory. Those features uses the traditional graphics rendering pipeline, too, so owners of AMD GPUs should have no trouble enjoying the same goodies. Nvidia does boast that it co-developed some of the GPU acceleration elements with Adobe, however, and it expects to see CUDA-based Photoshop CS4 plug-ins come out over the next two months.
Check out http://nvidia.com/adobe for a video showing off more GPU-accelerated CS4 goodness (and hip background music).
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