Nvidia + Adobe Announce GPU Acceleration

[ahmad]

GPUs with HD Video Playback Acceleration Enable Compelling Delivery of Flash Technology Based Web Content and Applications

Computex, Taipei — June 2, 2009 — NVIDIA (Nasdaq:NVDA), the inventor of the GPU, and Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced that they are collaborating as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and enable Adobe® Flash® Player, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices, including netbooks, tablets, mobile phones and other on-the-go media devices.

Adobe Flash Player will be accelerated across the range of NVIDIA processors, including NVIDIA Tegra™, enabling users to enjoy uncompromised Web browsing, full H.264 video playback and rich, consistent Flash technology based content any time, any place and on any platform.

NVIDIA is also participating in the Open Screen Project, a broad initiative of 25 industry leaders to deliver a consistent runtime environment across devices. Led by Adobe, the Open Screen Project is dedicated to enable Web content and standalone applications across desktops, netbooks, mobile devices, televisions and other consumer electronics that take advantage of Adobe Flash Platform capabilities. For more information, visit www.openscreenproject.org.

“NVIDIA and Adobe share precisely the same vision – visually compelling applications running on every device,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager, Handheld Business at NVIDIA. “Consumers don’t have to sacrifice streaming video performance on small inexpensive platforms such as netbooks. A Tegra-based platform enables the rich, smooth playback they expect from a desktop PC.”

“NVIDIA’s unique expertise makes it an ideal partner for Adobe to integrate cutting-edge graphics and video acceleration into the Adobe Flash Platform, benefiting all types of devices,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Flash Player will leverage the power of the GPU to provide a rich, desktop-compatible Web experience on a wide range of devices.”

blah blah blah ...
Source: Adobe

What does this mean for ATI?

[faster3200]

What does this mean for ATI?

Considering that Adobe did the same thing with Photoshop, probably nothing. Photoshop gpu acceleration works with ATI cards just fine. I think the more interesting news is that we might finally see wide flash support for mobile devices.

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

yeah lol ATI already does photoshop CS4 admirably.

[grimREEFER]

so will ion netbooks be able to watch the 480p stream on hulu?

i must buy one then lol.

its seriously one of my issues with netbooks, that they cant watch flash videos, and I literally need my fix of the daily show and colbert everyday. (and xvid tvrips look bad compared to the flash)

[Chickenfeed]

Yes, the whole point of this is mobile flash support. That was / is one of my grips with the PSP and itouch/phones so hopefully we might actually see this in the way of firmware upgrades ( perhaps in the upcoming iPhone software release )

[ahmad]

Stupid, I forgot to mention FLASH in the url.

Flash is becoming.. bloated? I think its time for new technology.

[3NZ0]

Will this mean that ion will be able to play flash and flash HD on 1080p displays without a single problem in the near future?

[BrowncoatGR]

yeah lol ATI already does photoshop CS4 admirably.

Better than Nvidia in my experience

[faster3200]

Flash is becoming.. bloated? I think its time for new technology.

I wouldn't say it is becoming bloated, just that the use of flash is starting to become less necessary as server side languages (and soon HTML 5) and change in design taste (for the better) are starting to replace a lot of its selling points.

For what it does do it does well. There have been technologies that tried to replace it (remember Silverlight?) but it is insanely hard to get the majority of internet users to download and install a plug-in, I mean most don't even update their anti-virus and get a bunch of people to make stuff with it. It is honestly a miracle that Flash has the adoption it does. The problem with Flash (and similar tech) for phones has always been bandwidth and battery life. Flash eats way more bandwidth than just a normal page does, even with graphics. This has been helped by mobile flash (flash lite) and the growing adoption of 3G and better speeds for mobile devices. The current biggest issue is that is eats battery. This was cited by Apple as the main reason for its exclusion from the iPhone. Now that ARM procs are able to do more with the same or less power this is becoming less of a reason and hopefully with Tegra it is no longer a reason. There are other factors involved as well, but these are the main ones currently.

I will actually be excited when flash is supported by mobile devices since I really like flash for certain things. I can't tell you how many web designers I have spoken to that don't use flash anymore simply because the iPhone and other mobile devices can't display it.

[RaynQuist]

For a moment there I thought my PDF was going to render faster...

[aka1nas]

For a moment there I thought my PDF was going to render faster...

The last 2 versions of Adobe Reader already do GPU acceleration.

[Talonman]

“NVIDIA’s unique expertise makes it an ideal partner for Adobe to integrate cutting-edge graphics and video acceleration into the Adobe Flash Platform, benefiting all types of devices,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Flash Player will leverage the power of the GPU to provide a rich, desktop-compatible Web experience on a wide range of devices.”

Thanks Nvidia...

Keep up the fine job.

[Sr7]

Considering that Adobe did the same thing with Photoshop, probably nothing. Photoshop gpu acceleration works with ATI cards just fine. I think the more interesting news is that we might finally see wide flash support for mobile devices.

yeah lol ATI already does photoshop CS4 admirably.

You guys don't seem to get it. Both NVIDIA and ATI got to accelerate Photoshop at the exact same time since it uses OpenGL.. it wasn't like 1 got accelerated through Brook or CUDA first.

This article is specifically about the ability to accelerate flash on the GPU, which is as of right now NVIDIA only.

[zanzabar]

You guys don't seem to get it. Both NVIDIA and ATI got to accelerate Photoshop at the exact same time since it uses OpenGL.. it wasn't like 1 got accelerated through Brook or CUDA first.

This article is specifically about the ability to accelerate flash on the GPU, which is as of right now NVIDIA only.

actually adobe loves openCL, and they have said before that they didnt like the idea of cuda and having nonstandard apps.

[Serra]

Hmmmm.

Happy and not. Happy for mobile devices, but unhappy because it means that Adobe et al. are going to get even lazier with Flash. It's already too slow/buggy for what it is, and somehow I doubt enabling further hardware acceleration will help. Same with PDF's actually. Non-Adobe readers work just fine, but even on some higher-end hardware Adobe's reader seems to just crawl if you try breezing through pages with images on them.

Guess it's a draw in my books.

[570091D]

NVIDIA (Nasdaq:NVDA), the inventor of the GPU

nvidia invented the gpu? i think not...

this is good news for those excited about the m$ zuneHD, it should be running tegra, and (if true) will have full access flash based websites. this could actually make the whole MID market much more interesting.

[eleeter]

nvidia invented the gpu? i think not...

They invented the term GPU, apparently, and brag about that fact quite a lot.

[MsB]

Thats Nice, now how about a 64 bit flash for IE64 FFS

[ahmad]

Thats Nice, now how about a 64 bit flash for IE64 FFS

Ahahaha. Yeah no kidding. noobs.

[zanzabar]

nvidia invented the gpu? i think not...

this is good news for those excited about the m$ zuneHD, it should be running tegra, and (if true) will have full access flash based websites. this could actually make the whole MID market much more interesting.

off topic, if the zune HD was tegra i think that NV would have made a big deal and if it is then im going to be disjointed. i figured that they would go with a marvel solution as is the industry standard.

[B.E.E.F.]

yeah lol ATI already does photoshop CS4 admirably.

Too bad its a bloated turd over CS3.

[faster3200]

Too bad its a bloated turd over CS3.

Woah, woah, woah... CS4 is such a massive improvement over previous versions, compared to how much they normally change, it is astonishing. They added some awesome new features and changed the layout to increase the amount of available workspace. It is by FAR the best version of Photoshop yet. If you just play around with filters and do basic things I can see how you might think that, but there is no way you could get away saying that to an actual designer. It does require more from your comp, but I can't think of a single designer who would hesitate to drop $1000 on their comp (Mac) if it meant that they could handle 20 30MP Raw files better or if having 300 vector layers at 24"x30" at 350dpi didn't lag at all.

[Talonman]

actually adobe loves openCL, and they have said before that they didnt like the idea of cuda and having nonstandard apps.

They did however decide to support PhysX on Adobe Director 11.5.

http://www.adobe.com/products/director/

Advanced physics with NVIDIA® PhysX™ support

Does Adobe Director 11.5 only support PhysX, or openCL too?

I don't understand if openCL = DX11... Can an app support one, but not the other?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

"AMD has decided to support OpenCL (and DirectX 11) instead of the now deprecated Close to Metal in its Stream framework.[5][6] RapidMind announced their adoption of OpenCL underneath their development platform, in order to support GPUs from multiple vendors with one interface.[7] NVIDIA announced on December 9, 2008 to add full support for the OpenCL 1.0 specification to its GPU Computing Toolkit."

Is openCL and PhysX non compatible? Or should I rather ask, would you probably select to support only one, and not both due to expense?

I do have a grip on that PhysX APIs, and openCL or DX11 APIs are two different animals, each with their own libraries. You probably would opt to only officially support one or the other correct?
I guess I am not too sure what to think anymore, on how GPU's speed will be harnessed in the future.

No matter what API Nvidia decides to go with in the future, I only hope the option to unload some of the work to a GPU running in dedicated PhysX mode, or physics mode, DirectX 11 mode, or when calculating OpenCL program calls...

[zanzabar]

openCL and physX are compatible its just not going public until NV puts out their openCL package and that should be when the havok GPGPU client is out or when dx11 is out. as of now physX runs on CUDA

[Talonman]

Thanks...

So what would PhysX run on in the future? Are you saying CUDA may go away, or be replaced with OpenCL?

Would we then be saying that PhysX runs on OpenCL? How does that fit in with DX11?