{"id":40,"date":"2009-03-08T16:40:46","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T23:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2009\/03\/08\/gpu-acceleration-in-photoshop-cs4\/"},"modified":"2009-03-08T16:40:46","modified_gmt":"2009-03-08T23:40:46","slug":"gpu-acceleration-in-photoshop-cs4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2009\/03\/08\/gpu-acceleration-in-photoshop-cs4\/","title":{"rendered":"GPU Acceleration in Photoshop CS4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adobe Photoshop<\/a> is one of the most ubiquitous image editing programs\u00c2\u00a0on the planet, used not only by\u00c2\u00a0photo editors, but illustrators, graphic designers, web designers, VFX artists, and many others. \u00c2\u00a0With the last few releases,\u00c2\u00a0Adobe has continued to push their most popular product into even more diverse applications,\u00c2\u00a0including 3D object support, video frame editing, and now medical imaging.\u00c2\u00a0 It would sometimes feel that the basics have been\u00c2\u00a0completed and then left dormant with all these new peripheral changes, but there one new set of features in the CS4 release that has the potential to improve the performance of the program in any possible imaging workflow.\u00c2\u00a0 This set of features would be the ones based on GPU acceleration from OpenGL supported graphics cards.\u00c2\u00a0 My recent review of the new\u00c2\u00a0NVIDIA Quadro CX <\/a>gave me an opportunity to really explore the possibilities that these new features bring to the table.
\n
\nSince the Quadro CX is\u00c2\u00a0one of the\u00c2\u00a0fastest professional GPU cards available in the world, combining it with Photoshop’s new GPU acceleration is the best way to highlight the advantages of each.\u00c2\u00a0 Photoshop is usually seen as a program for manipulating still images, and while it now has the capability of working with video and 3D models, still images remain its primary focus.\u00c2\u00a0 Since computer hardware has advanced so far in the last decade, basic image manipulation can be easily accomplished directly in a modern CPU.\u00c2\u00a0 But who wants “basic” when you can instead be fluidly rotating a 442 Megapixel image without any loss in quality, in 32bit floating point color space.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a number of new features that center around improving program responsiveness, especially with extremely large images.\u00c2\u00a0 When dealing with large images without GPU acceleration, any update to the display, including scrolling and zooming, is presented in a series of tiled segments, as the change in view is processed.\u00c2\u00a0 With the new OpenGL<\/a> based acceleration, most basic changes to view, as well as many other operations are nearly instantaneous.\u00c2\u00a0 I believe much of these improvements are made possibe by caching a scaled down copy of the entire image as a texture in the GPU memory.\u00c2\u00a0 Anytime a new portion of image that is not currently in the frame buffer is needed, the lower resolution copy is referenced and displayed until the full resolution data is available from the system.\u00c2\u00a0 What this presents to the user is a much more fluid interaction with the image, but occasionally at a visibly lower resolution until the system catches up a second or two later.\u00c2\u00a0 While this\u00c2\u00a0scaled down\u00c2\u00a0copy cached as a texture is smaller than the original file, it must be higher resolution than the screen, since zooming to fit to screen is instantaneous, and looks visually perfect.\u00c2\u00a0 The new BirdEye view for quickly jumping to a different part of the image utilizes this capability to display the entire image onscreen instantly.<\/p>\n

Other new features in Photoshop CS4 that require OpenGL acceleration will benefit work on even regular sized images.\u00c2\u00a0 Images viewed at magnification levels that are not\u00c2\u00a0even multiples (1\/2, 1\/4, etc.) are now displayed at\u00c2\u00a0much higher quality, as well as being\u00c2\u00a0much faster and more fluid, since the preview is being scaled in the graphics card.\u00c2\u00a0 You can smoothly zoom to any level instead of the previous default 100%, 50%, 33%, etc. and the image will look perfectly clear.\u00c2\u00a0 You can also rotate the previewing plane without permanently effecting the image quality or dimensions, and continue to interact with the image at that angle.\u00c2\u00a0 Although it initially seems trivial, after a bit of thought I can conjure up a variety of important but obscure uses for this capability, most of which relate more to art and design than video post-production.\u00c2\u00a0 There is also a new pixel grid that is available to clearly dilineating the boundaries between individual pixels at extremely close zoom levels (>600%)\u00c2\u00a0 I am honestly not sure why this requires GPU acceleration, but it is unavailable unless you have a supported OpenGL graphics card.\u00c2\u00a0 My only complaint about the new functionality and acceleration found in Photoshop CS4 is that Adobe saw fit to specifically skip its implementation in the 64bit version of Windows XP.\u00c2\u00a0 Since this is the highest performing version of Windows available, Adobe’s failure to directly support it will cause its users continued frusteration for some time to come.<\/p>\n

The only possible relief on the horizon in that regard is that Windows 7 seems to have been fast-tracked by Microsoft due to the Vista issues.\u00c2\u00a0 Speaking of future developments, hopefully we will soon be able to\u00c2\u00a0display 10bit color from Photoshop onto a Dreamcolor LCD via DisplayPort.\u00c2\u00a0 I suspect that this may not be available until CS5, but I am sure it is coming, based on the increasing level of hardware support on products that are now coming to market, with the Quadro CX leading the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most ubiquitous image editing programs\u00c2\u00a0on the planet, used not only by\u00c2\u00a0photo editors, but illustrators, graphic designers, web designers, VFX artists, and many others. \u00c2\u00a0With the last few releases,\u00c2\u00a0Adobe has continued to push their most popular product into even more diverse applications,\u00c2\u00a0including 3D object support, video frame editing, and now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[43,37,7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}