05/23/2008, 2:40pm, EDT
Friday, May 23rdAdobe CS4 to bring GPU, physics support [U]
(Update with corrections) 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.
Update: John Nack of Adobe corrects and notes that the TG Daily article includes multiple inaccuracies. No ship dates or product names have been made official, he says. He also adds that claims of using physics processing are incorrect, that CS3 currently doesn't use GPU effects, and that the advancements aren't necessarily targeted at any one Photoshop release. Electronista apologizes for the error.
Filed under: software
Other story tags: NVIDIA, AMD, GeForce, Adobe, ATI, Radeon, Photoshop, Cuda, GPGPU
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And it's about fuckin' time...gawd.
yes…
Gone are the days of working out…
Physics support at last. :-)
in 3 years when CS4 ships
CS3 just recently shipped. Don't expect this for at least 3 years :)
WTF
At the upgrade prices Adobe has these days I say F**K CS4. CS3 is fine and still in it's new box smell.
Re: WTF
CS3 is a POS, and isn't worth the bloated upgrade price if you've already got CS or CS2. If you paid for it, I'm sorry... A lot of CS4 is being rewritten in Cocoa for 64-bit use and (hopefully) will be worth waiting for.
See:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/04/03/adobe.delays.64.bit.cs4/
adobe needs to...
stop wasting time adding useless features that graphics pros don't even care about. no one i know even wants to open the extract tool in photoshop, because it sucks. when photos need to be clipped out of the background, the pen tool has been and still is the best solution.
and no one i know even cares about the addition of 3d rendering. that's what 3d programs are for.
all these things just add to the program's bloat and make it even harder to transition to 64-bit, etc.
3D my ass
Photoshop's and Illustrator's 3D tools are the worst ever. Adobe should've kept Streamline as a separate program and updated it incrementally.
Adobe does not seem to "get it" anymore. The same way they screwed-up PageMill, GoLive and now they bought Macromedia (God have mercy), discontinued Freehand without moving any of the benefits to Illustrator. The arrow-head effect in Illustrator sucks-ass, selecting elements below the upper ones sucks (except in InDesign).
Bridge is useless, who wants to even learn Bridge and why? Adobe seems to want the user to be consumed in a total Adobe environment and to some extent lose the OS user-interface, are they planning an Adobe OS? It sure seems like it.
Adobe is also waaaay behind in bringing 3D to Flash, yeah they've made some progress but it's primitive, and I'm very skeptical with Adobe's 3D talent.
Watch them put physics in the wrong apps! Actually for Adobe the only two apps that will benefit from physics would be AfterEffects and Flash.