GPU acceleration is one of the most significant trends in today hardware industry, opening the doors to an entirely class of software running desktop. What will be possible is fascinating to see on a monitor, nut it is not tangible, if you just hear about it. It appears that the next Photoshop will be one of the first mainstream applications that will tap into the GPU for a speed up. And, at least from what we have seen during a first demonstration, the progress is simply stunning.

We have been saying it for a while now, mainstream applications need GPU acceleration to ring in the next major evolutionary step in software development. Far too long we have been stuck in a cycle of programming that relies on increasing clock-speeds, brings acceleration with new CPUs and a slow-down with new software releases. Even if Photoshop supports multi-core CPUs, it is one of those applications that always are very time intensive to use and especially if you are a professional user and work with huge images, then you are very familiar with “The Great Wait”, which typically describes the time lost when opening a big file or when applying a filter.

But there appears to be a very effective solution on the horizon, a solution that is most likely more effective than anything else we have seen before and in our experience using Photoshop over the past 14 years. During a demonstration at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, we got a glimpse of Adobe’s "Creative Suite Next" (or CS4), code-named “Stonehenge”, which adds GPU and physics support to its existing multi-core support.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.