We’ve seen some videos of how much Cuda with Nvidia graphics card can speed up certain effects in Photoshop CS4 and Premiere CS4. This is all a part of newly announced Creative Suite 4 and support for Nvidia’s Cuda.
Nvidia takes over acceleration on its GPU and it can run tremendously and notably faster than these programs accelerated just by the CPU. In Premiere CS4, in one of the plugins, Nvidia claims up to seven times faster performance compared to raw CPU power.
We’ve seen videos of Photoshop CS4 with and without GPU and the performance of real time image rotation, instant zooming and panning are notably faster with GPU.
Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, high-dynamic tone mapping and colour conversion should run faster too.
On Adobe After Effects CS4 you can get effects such as depth of field, bilateral blur effects, turbulent noise such as flowing water or waving flags, and cartoon effects accelerated on GPU.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 can also accelerate Video but only with Quadro GPUs. Photoshop works with normal Nvidia GPUs. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 can use the Quadro GPU to accelerate high-quality video effects such as motion, opacity, color, and image distortion. They will enable faster editing of multiple high-definition video streams and graphic overlays and provide a variety of video output choices for high-quality preview, including display port, component TV, or uncompressed 10 or 12-bit SDI.
If you use Elemental RapiHD CUDA Plug-In for Premiere Pro CS4 you can get up to seven times performance gain over CPU. This plug-in can Render Blu-ray quality AVC/H.264 files in real-time, Scrub multiple streams of AVCHD and HDV video, Accelerated workflow with fast high-quality scaling, cross-dissolves, and transition effects.
As Nvidia wants to keep making money on Quadro graphic card series, Premiere effects works only on this ultra expensive professional cards but we can say that it does make a huge difference at least on video . We are working to try this in our lab environment and justify these claims but from the videos we’ve seen, the GPU accelerated Photoshop CS4 and Premiere CS4 do run notably faster than the CPU accelerated ones.
I guess this is what Intel was afraid in the first place. A senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe made a bold statement saying:"A critical element of CS4 was to capture the enormous power of the GPU. The difference is astounding. Performance is important to creative professionals and with the NVIDIA GPU, they are assured to be able to interact with images and videos in a much faster, smoother, more engaging way."
Let me remind you that this works only on Geforce 8 and 9 series GPUs and it doesn’t run on Radeons as ATI doesn’t support Cuda at this time.
You can check some of the videos
here but the Creative Suite 4, Photoshop CS4, and Premiere CS4 that most of you might care about should be out in October. I guess Nvidia was right, GPU can be used for "smart" things not only gaming.
