Filed under: Rumors, Software, Graphic Design
Photoshop CS4 to include GPU acceleration?
One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac's graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.TG Daily is reporting that Adobe recently previewed the next version of Photoshop (CS Next / CS4) with GPU acceleration. And as expected it made for an enormous improvement in speed. They they observed "the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core [Intel] Skulltrail system."
There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine) and also no discussion of if and how the 32-bit limitation of CS4 on the Mac might affect this GPU assisted performance boost. Nonetheless, the addition of GPU acceleration is a big deal, and perhaps will push Apple into getting more high performance graphics cards into its systems.
[via Gizmodo]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Billy said 3:39PM on 5-25-2008
Did you even read the story before you wrote this?
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"There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine)"
If you look at the screenshot it is on a mac, and if you want further proof you can watch the demo at this link: https://admin.connectpro.acrobat.com/_a791863308/p40652716/ (it starts at about 18 minutes in) where you will see the demo done on a mac running leopard. I love tuaw but honestly this was just laziness.
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Alex Brooks said 3:47PM on 5-25-2008
Comments from Adobe - http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/05/oct_1.html
Basically CS4 is pretty much a myth so far, October is a made up date and GPU acceleration is merely being demoed.
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Oseary said 4:19PM on 5-25-2008
Yea, what's the deal on the day late post? MacRumors posted this yesterday. :-|
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JimB said 7:06PM on 5-25-2008
I'd just like to second what Alex wrote above (and encourage a reading of the blog post he links to). While it's accurate to say that there was no mention of a Mac version, according to John Nack--the man who gave the presentation in question--it's also accurate to say that no one at Adobe has ever referred to any product under the CS4 name and that even the features being demoed may or may not find their way into any version of Photoshop in the future, let alone CS4.
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Ian Murray said 7:30PM on 5-25-2008
Adobe Photoshop Project Manager John Nack, who gave the presentation cited in the TG Daily article, says that many of their claims are baseless. Regarding their claim of an October 1st release date for the next Photoshop release, Nack says that they "pulled a date apparently out of thin air." He also says that the technology he demonstrated has not been promised to appear in any particular future version of Photoshop.
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navstar said 9:41PM on 5-25-2008
GPU and 64-bit are completely non-related. There's no reason why Adobe can't do this with the CS4 Mac. Pixelmator is "only" 32-bit and it knocks the socks off Photoshop as far as speed goes.
I think too many people are stuck in the videogame days where 16-bit was twice as good as 8-bit and 32-bit was better than 16-bit. 64-bit is *not* twice as fast or as "good" as 32-bit. In the case of Photoshop, 64-bit would mean giving PS access to more than 3GB of RAM... period.
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Clark Goble said 2:46PM on 5-26-2008
Yes but for people with large files (and in these days of 10 megapixel cameras that's a lot of people) being able to break across the artificial virtual memory system Adobe uses makes a huge difference in speed.
AlphaTeam said 3:38AM on 5-26-2008
We already know this story was pulled out of thin air already:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/05/oct_1.html
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Marcelo Alves said 2:51PM on 5-26-2008
Pixelmator uses CoreImage, which uses a GPU when available. I really can't understand why the Photoshop isn't using it.
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