Nvidia sheds some flash light on Adobe CS4

GPUs all over the (Photo)shop

AFTER A SOME five years in the marketing pipeline, Nvidia graphics card users will now be able to noodle about on Adobe's new Creative Suite 4, supported and accelerated natively on a GPU.

Adobe had already announced its new CS4 on Tuesday, but at a press briefing by Nvidia yesterday, shed some more light on the partnership between the two firms.

Purportedly, by rewriting core imaging kernels - using OpenGL - to ensure they use the GPU instead of the CPU, Nvidia and Adobe claim to have found ways to enhance the system and make images prettier, faster.

Of all the programs bundled into Adobe’s CS4, Photoshop and Premier Pro are really the two which benefit most from the GPU integration perspective, with general manager of the Professional Solutions group at Nvidia, Jeff Brown noting the tech would "enable much more output".

This is good news for impatient graphics geeks who want to cut down on the amount of time they need to render HD movies, for instance. Nvidia reckons movies which used to take up to 28 hours to render on Premier Pro could now feasibly be rendered in just two or three hours.

Nvidia claims that harnessing the power of the GPU would also allow for some more speedy editing. It reckons motion, opacity, colour and even image distortion could be done in real-time rendering.

Photoshop buffs will also supposedly feel the benefit of GPU integration, with Nvidia saying users will now be able to rotate images in real-time, not to mention zooming, and panning to their heart’s content. The GPU could also prove quite useful to Photoshoppers for smoothing out the jagged edges in their images, using anti-aliasing.

Really getting graphic, Nvidia noted that using the GPU to power programmes like Adobe After Effects could do a fair bit to provide better depth of field, reduce image noise, better bilateral blur effects and even add in all kinds of cartoon imagery.

Adobe says it will be shipping its CS4 next month.