With Adobe's newest version of Adobe® Photoshop CC, now available to Adobe Creative Cloud™ members everywhere, several fantastic and valuable new features have been made available that are sure to be appreciated by anyone who takes graphic design and photography seriously. While the new features are available to some degree to every Photoshop CC user, those with AMD APUs and GPUs will have built-in performance optimizations that will enable them to enjoy the full experience as the Adobe developers intended. How about a vivid, practical example? Let's take a look at the remarkable Smart Sharpen feature. Smart Sharpen is a workhorse tool that lets users create crystal clear images by minimizing noise and halo effects. To find the perfect image, the tool lets users choose the preferred algorithm and dynamically adjust the amount and radius of sharpening and noise reduction.
Early in 2013, AMD and Adobe collaborated to use OpenCL™ to help increase performance for just the “de-noise” portion of the Smart Sharpen feature. The results were good--we saw overall Smart Sharpen performance double simply by leveraging AMD graphics technology for this one portion of the Smart Sharpen pipeline1.
With the newest release of Adobe Photoshop CC, AMD and Adobe developers looked deep into the code to help take maximum advantage of OpenCL™ across the entire Smart Sharpen pipeline and thereby fully leverage AMD GPU compute power. The results are nothing short of spectacular. Take a look at this video for comparison:
In fact, we found that the new AMD A10-7850K APU processed images up to 11 times faster with OpenCL On versus Off when we used it to process a 21 MP image with the new OpenCL™-optimized Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature2. We also found up to 46 times faster performance3 on our top-of-line AMD FirePro™ W9000 card when compared with CPU-only processing, even with an image as large as 64 MP! Yes, you read it correctly—up to 46 times faster!
What you are seeing is the impact of the close collaboration between AMD and Adobe to bring the promise of heterogeneous computing--where the system and software are designed to make the best, most intelligent use of all of the CPU and GPU resources on board--to the most demanding creative workflows. These speed boosts are critical to your workflow. They can mean the difference between having the freedom to adjust and tweak until you get the image exactly the way you want it or accepting a “good enough” outcome in the face of repeated processing delays and interruptions to your creative flow.
We are seeing great overall competitive performance on both benchmarks and application tests with our recently launched “Kaveri” products. This new lineup is topped by the AMD A10-7850K APU powered by 12 Compute Cores* featuring AMD Radeon ™ R7 Graphics for revolutionary, responsive computing and next generation gaming (*Visit AMD.com/computecores).
Reviews so far include such accolades as the “Gold Award” from PC Perspectives, and “Dam Good Value,” and “Dam Good” awards from Hardware Canucks. Joel Hruska from Extremetech wrote, “With HSA enabled, however, (Libre Office) performance skyrockets — AMD’s A10-7850K is more than 5x faster than the Core i5-4670. This, more than any other result, points to the potential of HSA.”
Here are the results of our competitive testing for the new performance-enhanced Smart Sharpen now shipping with Adobe’s latest Photoshop CC): 
Here's a video showing the benchmark in action:
The ultimate goal of all this is for the technology to keep pace with the user's creativity. We think this represents a dramatic step in the right direction.One of Adobe's most innovative and, frankly, remarkable new features for Photoshop CC is Perspective Warp, which lets the user adjust the perspective of a select part of an image while leaving other areas untouched to create the perfect image.
Adobe developers have tapped OpenGL to take advantage of AMD GPUs to accelerate on-screen rendering so users can see and modify their results instantaneously. You will also find that same interactive, on-screen speed at work, with the outstanding new 3D beautify and 3D print preview features in the latest version of Adobe Photoshop CC.
The new release of Adobe Photoshop CC represents another important step forward in the development of intelligent application workflows that make full use of all the processing resources available in a system. Adobe continues to show real leadership in taking advantage of heterogeneous compute design. Working together, AMD and Adobe ensure that users’ creativity is never limited by performance.
Supporting Resources
Clarice Simmons is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
1.AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary configuration yielding different results. Test project used the new Smart Sharpen effect with Adobe Photoshop CC pre-release build, version 1.0.0.157 from 4/23/2013, test image: 5616x3744, 60.2MB, .PSD format. A notebook PC with AMD A10-5850M APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 8650G Graphics, 2x2GB DDR3-800 RAM, video driver 12.105.0.0 - 07-Apr-2013, SSD hard drive and Window 8 Professional (x64) build 9200 took 14.84 seconds with GPU acceleration on versus 31.03 seconds with GPU acceleration off. RIN-27
2.The AMD A10-7850K APU can process images at up to 11 times faster with the new OpenCL™- optimized version of the Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used the Smart Sharpen feature in Adobe® Photoshop® CC, updated January 2014, test image: 5616x3744, 60.2MB, .PSD format. A desktop PC with AMD A10-7850K APU with AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics, 2x4GB DDR3-2133 RAM, video driver 13.300.0.0 - 22-Dec-2013 (RC1), Window 8.1 build 9600, took 52.63 seconds with OpenCL off, 4.39 seconds with OpenCL on. KVD-4
3. The AMD FirePro™ W9000 graphics card can process images up to 46 times faster with the 2013 preview of a new OpenCL™- optimized version of the Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used December 2013 preview of a new OpenCL™- optimized version of the Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature, test image: 8000x8000, .PSD format. A desktop workstation with Intel® Xeon® E5506 processor, AMD FirePro™ W9000 graphics card, 3GB DDR3-1600 RAM, video driver FirePro 13.152.4, Window 7-x64, took 529.5 seconds with OpenCL off, 11.2 seconds with OpenCL on. FP-86
4. The AMD A10-7850K APU can process images at up to 3.2X the speed of an Intel i5-4670K with the updated (January 2014) Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature. AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used the Adobe® Photoshop® CC Smart Sharpen feature, updated January 2014, test image: 5616x3744, 60.2MB, .PSD format. A desktop PC with AMD A10-7850K APU with AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics, 2x4GB DDR3-2133 RAM, video driver 13.300.0.0 - 22-Dec-2013 (RC1), took 4.39 seconds with OpenCL on. A desktop PC configured with an Intel Core i5-4670K with Intel HD 4600 graphics, 2x4GB DDR3-1600, video driver 10.18.10.3379 - 17-Dec-2013, took 13.87 seconds with OpenCL™ on. Both systems used the same SSD hard drive and Window 8.1 build 9600. KVD-3
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