6 Replies Latest reply: Apr 15, 2007 8:57 AM by (Jeff_Schewe) RSS

    Is GPU used at all?

    klsteven-vBdprK Community Member
      Does lightroom profit in any way from graphics card acceleration (2D or 3D). Is a fast card better in any way than a slow one? I mean not for adjustments, but for scrolling or navigating and zooming.
        • 1. Re: Is GPU used at all?
          Community Member
          Was wondering the same. I think I remember reading that it makes little difference. I could be remembering wrong though. And since searching these forums is nearly useless I won't even bother to search for the message that I thought i read it in.

          Hopefully some one with some knowledge will respond.

          Take care
          • 2. Re: Is GPU used at all?
            Community Member
            I don't think so, at least I've not read of it doing so. Not that it won't in the future though. John Nack alluded to Bridge 2 using GPUs in a recent interview.
            • 3. Re: Is GPU used at all?
              Community Member
              I think that Adobe would be missing out on a huge potential for performance leaps here if they don't. I have been reading a lot lately about GPU's being used to supplement cpu's. The gains are potentially enormous when this type of number crunching is shared between even a modest cpu and gpu. And both nvidia and ati have been discussing the release of the necessary info to programmers to access their cores.

              I don't pretend to be an expert on this, nor to know all the terminology, but what I have read sounds fascinating... Not to mention the near future for AMD and ATI....... their talking about concepts for combining both (CPU & GPU) cores on a single chip
              • 4. Re: Is GPU used at all?
                Community Member
                "I think that Adobe would be missing out on a huge potential for performance leaps here if they don't."

                Don't believe the hype...while you do, in effect, have a separate super fast CPU with ram in the form of recent high end vid cards, what the CPUs are optimized for simply doesn't translate all that well into 2D use. They are optimized for high computational tasks such as 3D polygons (think gaming) and not ram intensive processor routines such as pixel based digital imaging. Some things CAN be made faster and by a lot, but other things simply don't scale to the current implementations of the cards.

                Add to that the difficulty of doing this cross-platform (which Adobe has to do) and what "may" work well on one OS, may not work at all on the other platform-requiring that SOMEBODY fill in the blanks-and so far the vid card makers haven't been keen on doing that.

                Apple Core Image is an example. Yes, some things in Core Image are made real fast because of the GPU-but, the same vid card on a PC gets no benefit because the GPU is an OS level implementation. Whose gonna make up the difference?

                The vid card makers are going to need to work that stuff out so the GPU is more cross-platform and put hooks into the cards that make it easier for apps-things like Photoshop and Lightroom to take advantage of them.
                • 5. Re: Is GPU used at all?
                  ArrrBee Community Member
                  Based on what Jeff said it sounds to me like Adobe could fill a needed spot
                  in the video card market by developing a video card taylored for Photoshop,
                  Lightroom and their other products. This is something I would be interested
                  in if it offered improvements in performance with their products and still
                  worked well for other programs (I could careless about games, but do do some
                  3D modeling from time to time) and offered dual monitor support.

                  Robert
                  • 6. Re: Is GPU used at all?
                    Community Member
                    Naw...they ain't much money in manufacturing vid cards...it's a commodity business-that's why there are really only two makers left.

                    Adobe is in the software business-where they do pretty well. But not hardware...