Nvidia CUDA 2.0 delivers Photoshop plug-in acceleration

Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia today released the second generation of CUDA, the company’s C-based programming environment that enables developers to tap into GPUs to accelerate their applications. There are several new features included, most interestingly a Photoshop plug-in example that provides guidelines how to design plug-ins that run on the GPU.

While we expect Intel’s discrete graphics card and accelerator board Larrabee to be release in 2009 or in 2010, we see Nvidia expanding its CUDA strategy to push GPU acceleration into the mainstream market. The company today released CUDA 2.0, which includes support for 32 and 64-bit Windows Vista and Mac OS X as well as 3D textures and hardware interpolation.

What caught our attention however, is Nvidia’s note the developer kit also includes “an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example for both PC and Mac versions of the software.” According to the Nvidia, that plug-in “allows developers to design plug-ins that move the most compute-intensive functions of Adobe Photoshop to the GPU”, which could deliver “dramatic performance improvements” and enable “advanced filters and imaging techniques that are available directly within Adobe Photoshop.”

Could it be that the collaboration between Nvidia and Adobe is much further along than we think? Some time ago, we quoted an Adobe employee and reported that the next Photoshop, will include GPU acceleration, which got Adobe extremely upset. Adobe later retracted a bit and said that it simply does not want to promise any features that may be included in the alpha version of its software (code-named “Stonehenge”) to also be available in the final version.

Today we know that this software in fact will be named CS4 and industry sources have reiterated in conversations with us that the October 1 release date in fact is still in place. Now we hear that CUDA can run features that are “directly” available in Photoshop, we wonder: Why wouldn’t Adobe include GPU acceleration in CS4?