Get more from your graphics card

Ever felt your graphics card was twiddling its digital thumbs while not gaming? In this Hardware column I’ll be looking at a new breed of applications that exploit the untapped processing power of your graphics card to accelerate a variety of non-gaming tasks.

I’ll also follow up on a question concerning the often confusing choice of Raid levels when configuring a new array.

Modern graphics cards have considerable processing power and memory bandwidth, yet they’re only generally fully engaged when playing 3D games or high-definition videos.

Over the past few years, a handful of other products have tapped into this resource, most notably Vista with its Aero interface, but it’s only recently that application developers have really begun to exploit this untapped power.

Some programs make use of instruction sets specific to certain vendors or graphics chipsets, such as Nvidia’s Cuda, while others simply use the industry-standard OpenGL which has much broader compatibility.

Arguably the highest profile applications to date that exploit GPU power are those in Adobe’s latest Creative Suite 4 (CS4) for short.

Contrary to popular belief, Adobe’s built-in GPU acceleration in CS4 is via standard DirectX and OpenGL, not Cuda, although several third-party products exploit Nvidia’s technology within CS4 applications.

Compatible software
According to Adobe, Acrobat 9, After Effects CS4, Bridge CS4, Flash Player 10, Photoshop CS4 and Premiere Pro CS4 will all exploit compatible graphics hardware to accelerate certain tasks.

You will need a graphics chipset and driver that supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3, while support for OpenGL 2 is additionally required by Photoshop CS4 and Bridge CS4.

As the most popular application in the suite, I’ll take a closer look at the impact of GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS4.

Graphics acceleration brings a number of enhancements to Photoshop CS4 inclu ding smooth display at all zoom levels, quick canvas rotation with the new Hand Rotate Tool, and a neat hand-toss function where a magnified image can be gently nudged or thrown around the screen smoothly as if it were on casters.

The latter is fun to use and you can watch Nvidia's demonstration videos.