Photoshop to get GPU and physics acceleration

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. During a demonstration at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, you could get 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? There was 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. 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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