Adobe to integrate GPU acceleration into Photoshop

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 28th May 2008
Comments (36) Stumble
If editing 442 megapixel images in real time isn't impressive enough, Adobe says there is more it can do with GPU acceleration.

If editing 442 megapixel images in real time isn't impressive enough, Adobe says there is more it can do with GPU acceleration.

During a meeting at Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters last week, Adobe revealed that Photoshop 'Next' will integrate GPU and Physics acceleration.

Even despite the fact that Adobe has already integrated multi-core support into Photoshop, editing photos is still an incredibly intensive process at the best of times. Based on the demo we saw during Adobe's presentation, that could be about to change.

We saw the presenter playing around with a 2GB, 442 megapixel image in Photoshop 'Next', which is codenamed Stonehenge, like it was an image several orders of magnitude smaller. And by that we mean we saw performance more akin to what we're used to seeing with images no bigger than about 1,600 x 1,200.

It was impressive, with zooming and image rotation tools being used with almost instantaneous results. Re-drawing after zooming right in happened in less than a second, while the presenter was rotating the image fast enough to make you dizzy if you stared for long enough.

We asked how the GPU acceleration would work with smaller images and the presenter explained that there would be less of a difference in performance, but then I guess that's to be expected – the reason Adobe opted for such a large image was to show just how much of a speed up it has seen and how things are going to bode for the future when parallelism increases.

The presenter also demonstrated importing 3D objects into Photoshop—applying skins, paint and textures to the 3D surfaces almost seamlessly—and then he finished his demonstration by showing a 3D accelerated panorama – one of the most time consuming tasks in Photoshop these days. With a GPU, the panorama becomes extremely usable and you'll be able to edit the panorama in real time while moving around the scene with incredible smoothness.

"This is just the beginning of what we can do with the GPU," said the presenter, after finishing his demonstrations. I'm excited to see what Adobe can do moving forwards – we've already seen GPU-accelerated Adobe Reader and there's also a plug-in coming for Adobe Premiere Pro in order to speed up video encoding too.

Adobe is arguably the world's biggest third party software maker, so this is massive news for anyone that uses any of its software. It also could be the start of the impending paradigm change we've been talking about for a while, where massively parallel loads are offloaded to the GPU which, of course, is massively parallel itself.

Are you excited by the prospects of GPU-accelerated Photoshop? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Quote E.E.L. Ambiense 28th May 2008, 13:46
Interesting. I look forward to checking this out myself in due time. Should be cool.
Quote 500mph 28th May 2008, 14:03
Sounds like Adobe is moving forward. I wish I had a good GPU for this though.
Quote VipersGratitude 28th May 2008, 14:21
It's about damn time Adobe capitalized on the wealth of extra (and appropriate) computing power available to most computers. Theres nothing worse than tweaking a filter in Photoshop, only having to wait 30 seconds to see the result of each incriment.

But the thing I'm really getting excited about is hardware acceleration for flash player 10 - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/visualperformance.html
Quote E.E.L. Ambiense 28th May 2008, 14:35
Being a veteran graphic designer and seeing Photoshop grow from the very beginning, I'm excited to see how this turns out. All the earlier releases were leaps and bounds; the later ones....not so much (from a monetary standpoint). But this could be the next leap for Adobe. I'll be cautiously watching.
Quote Gunsmith 28th May 2008, 14:40
about time, cant wait to sink my teeth into it :D
Quote yakyb 28th May 2008, 14:43
the power that CUDA holds is immense
Quote mclean007 28th May 2008, 14:50
Should we expect similar from GIMP at some time in the future? Photoshop is mightily pricy for a casual user, unless you have a "special" copy.
Quote MrMonroe 28th May 2008, 14:58
Somewhere an Intel exec in charge of badmouthing nVidia is spewing coffee over his desk.
Quote Bauul 28th May 2008, 15:01
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Should we expect similar from GIMP at some time in the future? Photoshop is mightily pricy for a casual user, unless you have a "special" copy.

It is quite amazing. The programe can costs hundreds of pounds yet everyone seems to have a copy...
Quote Tim S 28th May 2008, 15:23
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Should we expect similar from GIMP at some time in the future? Photoshop is mightily pricy for a casual user, unless you have a "special" copy.

Yes, I believe you will if the GIMP developers have downloaded the CUDA SDK (which is free).
Quote chicorasia 28th May 2008, 15:29
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrMonroe
Somewhere an Intel exec in charge of badmouthing nVidia is spewing coffee over his desk.


Gentlemen, fire your Powerpoints!
Quote sotu1 28th May 2008, 16:03
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Should we expect similar from GIMP at some time in the future? Photoshop is mightily pricy for a casual user, unless you have a "special" copy.

got a full legit edition for me mac for £300, a student edition, but still the full thing. back on topic, i'm well looking forward to this! all of a sudden there's an even better reason to have a high end GPU in both your PC and your mac.
Quote [USRF]Obiwan 28th May 2008, 16:22
So...
Intel claims that: "GPU's ARE ONLY USEFUL FOR GAMES" are back in the waste bin. Talking about waste bin, where is the article about Intels 'GPU's are useless' powerpoint presentation have gone?
Quote Arkanrais 28th May 2008, 16:26
what was the GPU they were using in their test rig?
edit: its about damn time companies other than gaming ones realized people have GPUs in their PC's, actually making use of that single component thats usually the most expensive thing in peoples rigs.
/edit
Quote Tim S 28th May 2008, 16:32
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arkanrais
what was the GPU they were using in their test rig?

something with more transistors than I've had hot dinners...
Quote The_Pope 28th May 2008, 17:30
NeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedTM
Quote mclean007 28th May 2008, 17:44
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arkanrais
what was the GPU they were using in their test rig?
edit: its about damn time companies other than gaming ones realized people have GPUs in their PC's, actually making use of that single component thats usually the most expensive thing in peoples rigs.
/edit
While the GPU may be the most expensive thing in a gamer's rig, it is unlikely to be the most expensive in your average person's PC. IIRC most of the PCs in the world run on integrated graphics, and of those with a separate card, most are not super high end 8800 Ultras or whatever - they are low to midrange cards in the sub-£100 price bracket, which means the CPU or motherboard could easily be more expensive.

Problem is, only gamers are likely to have nVidia 8- or 9-series cards, which are needed for CUDA, so software developers would be developing for a small installed base who could use the accelerated features. Similarly, how do you convince someone who has no interest in games to drop a big investment on a GPU when there is very little (other than games) that will use it? It's chicken and egg, and hopefully this round of software revisions (Photoshop, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, even to an extent Windows Vista with the Aero interface) will be the kick start we need.
Quote Tim S 28th May 2008, 17:55
the installed base isn't small... there are 70 million CUDA enabled GPUs on the market to give you an idea of scale. :)
Quote E.E.L. Ambiense 28th May 2008, 18:07
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
something with more transistors than I've had hot dinners...

Quote Multiplectic 28th May 2008, 18:35
About time! :D
Quote yakyb 28th May 2008, 19:38
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Problem is, only gamers are likely to have nVidia 8- or 9-series cards, which are needed for CUDA, so software developers would be developing for a small installed base who could use the accelerated features. Similarly, how do you convince someone who has no interest in games to drop a big investment on a GPU when there is very little (other than games) that will use it? It's chicken and egg, and hopefully this round of software revisions (Photoshop, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, even to an extent Windows Vista with the Aero interface) will be the kick start we need.

the point is video professionals and graphics professionals will start to invest in discreet GPUS when the products are released the performance gain is so immense that the time saving alone is worth the £300 for a 9800 for example you have to remember that the time used in encoding costs companies money so a measly £300 investment is nothing in reality

so this is going to be a huge success

i wonder how hard it is to code for CUDA
Quote p3n 28th May 2008, 19:45
Apple to start shipping less shoddy GPUs? :p
Quote supermonkey 28th May 2008, 20:20
Just the other day I was working with a 9-image stitch that resulted in a photo that weighed in at 1.7GB. It took quite some time for CS3 to churn through it, and I was left wondering how long it will take my 12- and 18-image stitches to fully process.

This new feature looks quite handy!

-monkey
Quote p3n 28th May 2008, 21:01
Apple to start shipping less shoddy GPUs? :p
Quote Icy EyeG 28th May 2008, 21:32
I'm glad to see that CUDA is finnaly getting "mainstream" (ie, for non-programmers).

Sometime ago, Adobe integrated the PhysX engine on their new Director 11 and nVIDIA also released documentation and source code examples to integrate CUDA in Photoshop Plug-ins/Filters. This means that older versions of Photoshop can use GPU acceleration through plug-ins/Filters.
Quote:
Originally Posted by yakyb
the point is video professionals and graphics professionals will start to invest in discreet GPUS when the products are released the performance gain is so immense that the time saving alone is worth the £300 for a 9800 for example you have to remember that the time used in encoding costs companies money so a measly £300 investment is nothing in reality

so this is going to be a huge success

QFT: Exciting times ahead indeed...
Quote:
Originally Posted by yakyb
i wonder how hard it is to code for CUDA

I'm not an expert, but it seems that porting an application to CUDA isn't too hard (provided you know c/c++). Accelerating it to viable speeds is much more difficult. Then again, I may be wrong... :o
Quote bubsterboo 28th May 2008, 23:13
I believe the CS3 photoshop has the after effects openGL engine in it already. You can actually use 3d in photoshop. Not sure if it will accelerate blend styles or anything right now though.
Quote Woodstock 28th May 2008, 23:27
for once im intersted in something adobe have done,but i wont really care till they release linux native photoshop or 64bit flash
Quote Icy EyeG 28th May 2008, 23:43
Quote:
Originally Posted by bubsterboo
I believe the CS3 photoshop has the after effects openGL engine in it already. You can actually use 3d in photoshop. Not sure if it will accelerate blend styles or anything right now though.

With Photoshop CS3 Extended, you can use 3D. However, CUDA isn't limited to 3D, is about accelerating general intensive tasks (math-intensive, for example) that take a big load from the CPU.
Quote Woodstock 29th May 2008, 05:16
Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by yakyb
i wonder how hard it is to code for CUDA

I'm not an expert, but it seems that porting an application to CUDA isn't too hard (provided you know c/c++). Accelerating it to viable speeds is much more difficult. Then again, I may be wrong... :o

cuda is C only at the moment, but they intend to allow C++ as well and possibly other langauges. And apparently it isnt much more difficult at all to use, just have to go a different way at the problem
Quote pizan 29th May 2008, 05:44
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
the installed base isn't small... there are 70 million CUDA enabled GPUs on the market to give you an idea of scale. :)

yea my laptop is CUDA enabled with an 8600M GT.

...i wonder if it is scalable with SLi, might make desktop do really well with Photoshop
Quote scq 29th May 2008, 05:45
I wonder if you'll need special drivers. Like would this only work on 'professional' cards like Fire GL and Quattro (not unlike how 3DS MAX or AutoCAD don't receive many benefits from mainstream gaming cards).
Quote Tim S 29th May 2008, 07:03
pizan: CUDA scales with SLI.
Quote mclean007 29th May 2008, 10:28
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
the installed base isn't small... there are 70 million CUDA enabled GPUs on the market to give you an idea of scale. :)
Wow, I hadn't realised it was quite that many! I guess that explains why software houses now feel there is a large enough "critical mass" to justify the development cost of CUDA acceleration. As I said, the reason it has taken a while to happen is a bit of a catch 22 - you need an installed base to justify development, but pro users won't install hardware that doesn't have a tangible benefit to the software they use. Now that the market penetration of CUDA capable GPUs is sufficient, the cycle is broken and I'd expect we'll see an avalanche of CUDA enabled software in the near future. Exciting times.
Quote Tim S 29th May 2008, 10:49
yep, there's a lot coming down the pipe. I've seen quite a bit of it running (and talked about), and I'm sure more will be revealed over the course of the year.
Quote naokaji 29th May 2008, 11:19
the idea is good, put those gpu's to use, also it could save pc gaming since buying a decent graphicscard would have more advantages.

*goes back to hole he came from and keeps cursing those damn consoles*
Quote Mr_Sinister 29th May 2008, 17:37
this sounds interesting
i will be looking forward to seeing how this turns out
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