Adobe Discovers Computers Have GPUs

Somewhat belatedly, Adobe's updated line of software (named Creative Suite v4) makes use of computer GPUs [the capabilities of the graphics chip] to speed up display operations. When CS4 ships in October, it will use the GPU to speed up zooms and pans, 3D rotation, and color correction. A later update adds support for faster effects through GPU-handled pixel blending.

The drawback to relying on GPUs is that the software becomes dependent on specific hardware configurations, as users of SolidWorks and Inventor have come to learn. 'Course, that may not matter if you are already used to Acrobat being slow.

Comments

[Evan Yares]

Not necessarily the case that using a GPU for display operations creates a hardware dependency. For example, OGRE3d (www.ogre3d.org) is a library that abstracts all the details of using system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL.

Adobe is using the GPU for actual computation, rather than just display. This is called GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units). I suspect they're using Nvidia's CUDA or AMD's Stream SDK.