The version of Photoshop included with Adobe's future Creative Suite 4 will include fuller acceleration both for dedicated video hardware as well as the first support for physics processing, TGDaily has been told as part of an early demonstration. While CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters, the new version will use video hardware to improve performance across much of the image editor's pipeline. It will also enable new editing techniques: users can bring in a 3D image and paint it with changes applied immediately.
An upcoming wave of video cards with special physics processing will also help, Adobe explains. AMD-made ATI Radeon HD cards with the company's GPGPU (general-purpose GPU) processing, and potentially NVIDIA's GeForce GTX line with CUDA support, will also take advantage of their support for non-video code to offload specialized tasks from the main processor and greatly reduce the rendering time for advanced effects or oversized images. Even 442-megapixel images can be processed quickly without requiring a high-end workstation, the demonstration suggests.
It's unclear as to whether all the features will apply to both Mac and Windows versions. AMD and NVIDIA currently provide Windows software drivers for workstation-class cards that enable general-purpose use on their processors, but omit this for most of their home user cards and don't yet have any such drivers available for Mac users.
CS4 is currently scheduled to ship on October 1st, but has yet to be formally announced.
Source: electronista
