“It’s not lost on us that when you look at the rate of GPU power advancement, there’s an enormous wealth of cycles we can take advantage of now,” (John Nack, principal product manager, Photoshop). He’s right, and in fact this release has been in the making for years. Adibe has been carefully looking at how to integrate GPU acceleration in its product. After all, a GPU is a “graphics” processor, right? Even if it is mainly 2D (a new 3D object painting has been introduced), Photoshop does process pixels.
However, when performing intensive tasks, memory bandwidth and disk access are often more problematic than the pixel processing itself, and Adobe is still looking for a great way to with this. Adding GPU acceleration in the user-interface for things like Zoom, Scale, Rotate and Effects Preview/Building is a great way to introduce hardware acceleration asthe benefits are immediately noticeable. This is far from realizing the full potential of GPUs, but now Photoshop CS4 users have one more way to make their work a little easier. A 128MB graphics card is recommended.
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