I've been playing around with CC. I'm firmly in the rage-against-the-prescription-model camp, but some of the technology is interesting.
Especially the expanded use of the GPU. In CS6, the GPU was called on for a few tasks, but it was mostly to speed screen redraw (real time brush effects, etc.) and had little to do with actual image processing. The exceptions are color space conversions and crop/rotate (important) and a bunch of goofy filters. Here's the list.
CC adds more GPU accelerations—with Smart Sharpen being far and away the most important to me.
I did a few quick tests on the sharpening layer of 2GB image. It was about 7300 pixels wide, 16-bit RGB.
With OpenCL turned off, Smart Sharpen took 11.6 seconds.
With OpenCL turned on, it took 3.5 seconds. The progress bar didn't even show up.
I did a few similar tests; in every case the GPU cut the time by a factor of 3 or more. The longest I had to wait was around 12 seconds on a 20,880 pixel-wide image.
I don't work on files that big all day long. I can wait 12 seconds! Not too many years ago I had to go make lunch and eat it while unsharp mask crunched away.
Settings used were lens blur, 1.4 pixels wide, 60% sharpening, noise reduction turned off.
EXCEPTION:
This was all with color files. When I tried with black and white images, there was NO DIFFERENCE with OpenCL turned on or off. It was equally slow both ways. This is counter-intuitive, since the b+w images have 16 bits per pixel vs. the color images' 48 bits. But it was repeatable. Converting a b+w image to RGB (and tripling the file size) actually reduced the sharpening time.
I'm guessing this is either a bug, or else b+w requires a different algorithm, and was not as high a priority. Either way, I'm guessing this will be a temporary snafu.
I'm using a 2010 mac pro, 6-core 3.33ghz, with 24GB ram. GPU is an ATI 5770. This is a midrange GPU from several years ago. Considering that all the real-time GPU accelerated effects happen instantly, and that the processing effects happen anywhere from instantly to plenty-fast-enough, there's probably no reason to covet a high end GPU for photoshop. Unless you're in a time=money production environment working on giant files, and you use a lot of the accelerated functions. The main thing is to have a supported GPU.
Bookmarks