Is it me, or does the announcement of the new CS4 seem all-too sudden? That said, if the reported performance boost is as good as claims then it can’t come soon enough!! Read more..

During a demonstration at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, TG Daily 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.

So, what can you do with general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) acceleration in Photoshop? How about playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core Skulltrail system. Changes made through image zoom and through a new rotate canvas tool were applied almost instantly. Another impressive feature was the import of a 3D model into Photoshop, adding text and paint on a 3D surface and having that surface directly rendered with the 3D models’ reflection map.

There was also a quick demo of a Photoshop 3D accelerated panorama, which is one of the most time-consuming tasks within Photoshop these days. The usability provided through the acceleration capabilities is enormous and we are sure that digital artists will appreciate the ability to work inside a spherical image and fix any artifacts on-the-fly.

According to information we were given, all of these new features are part of the next-gen Photoshop, which should be a part of the “CS Next” suite. The package is expected to be released on October 1.

Just a pity that CS4 won’t be coded in Cocoa, and that CS5 will likely not come out until 2010 at the earliest. Perhaps this is down to the love-hate relationship that Apple has with Adobe. Perhaps it’s down to the millions of lines of code it would take for a re-write. I’m betting it’s the latter.

Perhaps it might not hurt Mac users to run Bootcamp afterall