NVIDIA today announced that Adobe will natively support its graphics processing units (GPUs) in their newly announced Adobe Creative Suite 4. Adobe is the latest visual computing company to grab on to the massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs for more than just rendering pixels to the screen. With NVIDIA GPU acceleration, Adobe Creative Suite 4 enables a faster, more natural way of working with images, while improving quality and productivity. The latest edition in a long line of award-winning software toolsets, Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the first application set of its kind to take advantage of the power of native GPU acceleration.

"A critical element of CS4 was to capture the enormous power of the GPU," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. "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."

GPUs have long been essential platforms for real-time rendering of images to computer screens, but software developers have recently begun using their parallel processing power for a variety of different visual computing tasks. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the most important addition to this trend because of its market position as the leading design and development software suite.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 features a variety of creative tools that automatically detect the presence of NVIDIA Quadro or GeForce GPUs and uses the parallel processing capability of the GPUs to speed a number of visually intensive operations.

• Adobe Photoshop CS4 uses NVIDIA Quadro or GeForce GPUs to create an interactive digital canvas. The GPUs enable real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, and make changes to the view instantaneous and smooth. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also taps the GPU for 2D and 3D compositing and high-quality antialiasing, making jagged edges of text and objects a thing of the past. Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, and color conversion are also accelerated by the GPU.
• Adobe After Effects CS4 features a variety of creative visual effects accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, making it easier than ever to add graphics and visual effects to a video, speeding the work flow, and quickly moving from concept to final product. Effects accelerated by the NVIDIA GPU include depth of field, bilateral blur effects, turbulent noise such as flowing water or waving flags, and cartoon effects.
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 can take advantage of NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to accelerate high-quality video effects such as motion, opacity, color, and image distortion. Quadro-based graphics solutions 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.

"The GPU being a central ingredient of Adobe Creative Suite 4 is a monumental milestone in the computer industry. Adobe is the recognized leader in revolutionary content tools and this marks the beginning of the GPU accelerated creative revolution," said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing for NVIDIA. "We are honored to have been able to work so closely with the talented engineers at Adobe to help them take their world renowned suite to the next level."

For more information on Adobe Creative Suite 4, visit www.adobe.com/. For more information on using NVIDIA GeForce GPUs and NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions with Adobe Creative Suite 4, see www.nvidia.com/adobe.