Pulp To Pixels

NVIDIA releases Adobe CS4 CUDA plu­g­ins for Macs own­ers of more recent Macs with fast video cards were given an extra speed advan­tage on Mon­day with a new set of Adobe Cre­ative Suite 4 plu­g­ins.

The suite includes four plu­g­ins from third par­ties and cen­ters on Ele­men­tal Accel­er­a­tor 1.2, a video pro­cess­ing add-​​on. Those using Mac Pros with a Quadro FX 4800 video card can use the general-​​purpose com­put­ing fea­ture of these graph­ics chipsets to accel­er­ate video encod­ing for H.264-formatted videos well beyond what would be pos­si­ble with the proces­sor alone. NVIDIA esti­mates that the task can run 11 times faster than it would with­out the plugin.

The oth­ers, from Boris FX ‚pro­DAD and Red Giant Soft­ware, pro­vide less con­spic­u­ous gains but help out other key apps in Adobe's library, includ­ing After Effects, Flash and Photoshop.

Such plu­g­ins are a rar­ity for the Mac, which has sup­ported CUDA since last year but has only occa­sion­ally been sup­ported by widely avail­able apps. The sit­u­a­tion should change with the release of Mac OS X Snow Leop­ard in Sep­tem­ber, when the uni­ver­sal OpenCL stan­dard will encour­age cross-​​platform sup­port and let both ATI and NVIDIA cards run the same spe­cial code.

via AppleIn­sider | Apple sees brief iPhone 3GS short­ages; NVIDIA intros CS4 plu­g­ins.

About the author

Jeff designs print and web expe­ri­ences for a vari­ety of clients and enjoys shar­ing what he learns along the way. He entered the indus­try at the split of web design from graphic design occurred and is now fas­ci­nated as the two dis­ci­plines are on the cusp of com­ing full cir­cle to merge into a new, media savvy gen­er­a­tion of design­ers. When not crazy busy, Jeff likes geo­caching and con­sum­ing copi­ous amounts of cof­fee. You should fol­low him on Twit­ter and Facebook.

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