This is a bit of interesting news that I had bookmarked this week but haven’t gotten posted yet.  Two articles over at Fudzilla point to the fact that AMD’s GPUs will benefit just as much from the recent Adobe CS4 software GPU acceleration additions as NVIDIA’s parts.  First, here is the post that quotes an AMD rep saying as much.  How is that possible?  Because Adobe is using OpenGL and DirectX for the acceleration, not NVIDIA’s CUDA technology.  

The exception is the video encoding features:

Some Adobe plug-ins, such as RapiHD GPU accelerated encoder, available from Elemental Technologies, are created using Nvidia’s CUDA technology; but you will need Quadro to make it work.

Nvidia is betting on the fact that its Geforce and Quadro GPU have the best OpenGL drives in the industry and that due to its leadership in workstations many professionals will be getting Quadro GPUs to get more out of Adobe applications.

Ouch.  Again.  And you’re going to need Quadro cards for that to work?  Hopefully the community will find some hacks around that pretty soon….

The questoin is why isn’t AMD’s GPU team talking about this?  Is it because the lawyers are holding them back because of some kind of sweetheart deal with NVIDIA and Adobe?  Or is it because the video encoding stuff will not work and AMD’s parts?
We spoke with AMD about ATI’s potential ability to accelerate Photoshop CS4 and Premiere CS4 effects on a GPU and we were right about that lead.

ATI has confirmed that Radeon HD 4000 and HD 3000 series will help accelerate many things in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 pack.

ATI Radeon HD 4000 will accelerate Premiere and in Nvidia’s case, you need an ultra-expensive Quadro for that. This makes a big difference and ATI told Fudzilla that HD 3000 series will help accelerate video transcoding that will lead to faster video editing, 3D effects and transition, something that you use regularly in video edition are also accelerated on the GPU. ATI HD 4000 series might definitely sell well in this video editing market, as you pay a fraction of the price of Quadro and still get the acceleration. It will be fun to compare Nvidia vs. ATI on this particular application set.  

Photoshop CS4 extended is also accelerated on both Radeon HD 4000 and 3000 series. Both cards will help accelerate image and 3D model previewing including panning, zooming and rotation. ATI can accelerate 3D manipulations on photos (map an image onto a 3D object such as a sphere, for example).  

The less widespread, professionally oriented After Effects CS4 is also heavily accelerated on HD 4000 and HD 3000 cards. ATI’s GPU will help accelerate 3D effects in films, video and DVD editing in this popular video post-processing package.