AMD and Adobe Creative Suite 6 Innovate With OpenCL and GPU Acceleration

[btarunr]

AMD today announced a collaboration with Adobe Systems Incorporated to optimize a new set of GPU-accelerated features for Adobe products including the newly announced Adobe Photoshop CS6. Implementing GPU acceleration and incorporating OpenCL optimization improves the end-user experience by dramatically speeding up critical imaging features and generating real-time results when editing with key tools in Adobe Creative Suite 6.

"AMD brings its expertise in GPU and APU compute in the latest release of Adobe Creative Suite," said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. "This technology integration allows us to provide creative professionals with exciting new creative options and lightning-fast performance."

The collaboration between AMD and Adobe marks the first implementation of OpenCL within the Adobe Creative Suite family of products by accelerating features within Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. The new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine within Photoshop CS6 utilizes both OpenCL and OpenGL, to accelerate new and existing features such as the new Blur Gallery that runs up to 10x as fast on the upcoming "Trinity" APU with OpenCL GPU acceleration turned on. AMD has also worked with Adobe on a dramatically accelerated version of the Liquify tool, a filter within Adobe Photoshop CS6 that lets the user push, pull, rotate, reflect, pucker and bloat any area of an image for artistic effects. There are dozens of other GPU-accelerated features in the new Adobe Photoshop CS6.

"AMD engineers have worked closely with Adobe to ensure creative professionals have the best computing experience possible with the latest Adobe CS6 suite," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Content, Applications and Solutions at AMD. "By working with Adobe on industry standards, we have helped bring GPU and APU acceleration and new levels of performance to the market's premier digital imaging software."

AMD and Adobe will be teaming up again on June 11-14, 2012 at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) where Tom Malloy, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs will deliver a keynote address. In addition, the Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Flash teams will provide attendees of the summit's technical breakout sessions with the latest updates and insight on working with open standards on heterogeneous compute.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[jigar2speed]

If applications start taking advantage of APUs and GPUs, this will only hurt Intel in the long run.

 

[Fourstaff]

Finally, I have been waiting for them to get out of the CUDA boat since forever. Too bad some plugins will still use CUDA though.

 

[TheMailMan78]

Does this mean AMD finally got on the ball with openGL?

 

[micropage7]

Does this mean AMD finally got on the ball with openGL?

i dunno but AMD has better performance on openGL based benchmark than nvidia

 

[InnocentCriminal]

This can only mean good things for AMD. Food for thought; wonder if this will push Apple into releasing an APU based Macbook/iMac as a lot of "media" douchefags believe Adobe products run better on Apple computers. I guess if they already have an AMD GFX card then it won't matter.

Hmmm... bit of tangent there.

 

[AphexDreamer]

Took em long enough...

 

[TheMailMan78]

i dunno but AMD has better performance on openGL based benchmark than nvidia

AMD OpenGL is buggy as hell.

 

[KonstantinDK]

Whaaat?
INtel monopoly in Adobe is over?
But wait, they didn't announce the date yet. Maybe it's in a few years...

 

[1Kurgan1]

Looks like Mac's inthe Graphic Design field might be the way of the past (thank god).

 

[repman244]

AMD OpenGL is buggy as hell.

OpenGL is where FirePro/Quadro cards are good, OpenCL is something different...

 

[TheMailMan78]

OpenGL is where FirePro/Quadro cards are good, OpenCL is something different...

Different drivers completely. Most pros that use Photoshop don't use FirePro/Quadro crads.

 

[repman244]

Different drivers completely. Most pros that use Photoshop don't use FirePro/Quadro crads.

I know that, that's why I said OpenGL is very poor on gaming cards, PS uses CUDA AFAIK (OpenCL soon) and doesn't benefit from OpenGL at all.
My point was that OpenGL is not buggy it's just that there are no optimizations for it when using a gaming card. If it was buggy then no one would buy FirePro cards.

 

[Recus]

Homo Charlie Demerjian already dreaming how Adobe will drop Cuda.

 

[SIGSEGV]

Homo Charlie Demerjian already dreaming how Adobe will drop Cuda.

i hope so
i believe sometime it will be dead for sure..

 

[Disparia]

I know that, that's why I said OpenGL is very poor on gaming cards, PS uses CUDA AFAIK (OpenCL soon) and doesn't benefit from OpenGL at all.

Yup! ...except for all the places that it does benefit (screenshot from CS4, more in CS5+)

Certainly not game changing benefits, but it's been there for a few versions. Also, there are 3rd party plugins that utilize OpenGL in some fashion, usually for "fast preview" purposes. And, as the OP states, OpenGL isn't going away.


Edit- My work laptop happens to have CS3 Extended on it:

Not very descriptive :/ But after a couple searches, it seems that the acceleration was only for the Extended features (3D model import).

 

[racedaemon]

What happens to After Effects?

Anybody noticed how After Effects was not mentioned? That's really strange as my understanding is that Mercury Engine is used in both. I would hope the marketing team at AMD did not know about AE as further in the article they talk about Adobe CS6 as a whole. But then again they talk only about "Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Flash teams".

And AMD sound like a bicycle salesman trying to sell a car when they talk about the "dramatically accelerated version of the Liquify tool". WTH? I don't see the Liquify tool as THE tool to brag about. There is 3D and video editing in PS CS6.

I guess that AMD or Adobe tried to fully accelerate the CS6 but fell short of delivering for AE.

But maybe i'm wrong.

 

[applejack]

Photoshop never supported native CUDA-accelerated functions. so OpenCL for MGE is an addition, not a replacement. CUDA plugins would probably still apply to PS CS6.

also, at least Premiere Pro CS6 & After Effects CS6 still use CUDA (for MPE, Optix, etc…)

as stated here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe-cs6.html

and here:
http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/...prid=873999&releasejsp=release_157&xhtml=true

“Adobe Creative Suite 6 software continues to feature the NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro, providing up to an 8x performance boost2 for fast video editing. Adobe After Effects CS6 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 is also being demonstrated in the NVIDIA booth (SL9215).”