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Graphics Acceleration (GPU) support in Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications

What's covered
General information

Many of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications have enhanced features designed to take advantage of your display card's GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate application performance. The GPU is a dedicated graphics rendering chip that may be integrated into the computer motherboard or attached to a separate video display card and is very efficient at manipulating and outputting computer graphics. The extra processing power of the GPU makes some effects and accelerated rendering possible that would otherwise require extraordinary CPU (Central Processing Unit) speeds and large amounts of RAM. If a supported GPU is detected during launch, the application will take advantage of this added processing power.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications

The following list of Adobe CS4 applications will take advantage of the advanced processing capabilities of the GPU:

  • Acrobat 9
  • After Effects CS4
  • Bridge CS4
  • Flash Player 10
  • Photoshop CS4
  • Premiere Pro CS4

Note: For details regarding GPU support of individual Adobe products, please visit that product's system requirements page on the Adobe website.

Supported Video Cards

Adobe recommends DirectX 9.0 or later (on Windows) and Shader Model 3.0.* Display cards with 512MB or better of VRAM and support for OpenGL 2.0 are recommended. If your video display card is not detected as a supported card, GPU effects and preferences will not be visible within the application. It is also recommended that you download and install the most recent drivers available from your video card manufacturer.

*Note: Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Bridge CS4 use OpenGL 2.0, rather than DirectX. For Photoshop specific GPU documentation, please refer to the "GPU acceleration in Adobe Photoshop CS4" section of this document.

Tested Compatible Video Cards

Note: The graphics chipsets below are tested to function with Creative Suite 4. Individual applications may have a much larger list of cards that they have specifically tested with.

Windows systems

NVIDIA

GeForce 6 Series

6800 Ultra

GeForce 7 Series

7800 GTX

GeForce 8 Series

8800 GT

GeForce 9 Series

9600GT, 9800 (single GPU variant one)

Quadro FX Series

1700

Mid-Range

Quadro FX Series

4600

High

Quadro FX Series

5600

Ultra High-End

AMD/ATI

Radeon X1000 Series

1900

Radeon HD2000 Series

HD2900 XT

Radeon HD3000 Series

HD3870 X2

FireGL V-Avivo Series

V5600

Mid-Range

FireGL V-Avivo Series

V7600

High

FireGL V-Avivo Series

V8650

Ultra High-End

Macintosh systems

Mac Pro

First Generation

AMD/ATI

Radeon X1900

Second Generation

NVIDIA

GeForce 8800 GT

iMac

NVIDIA

GeForce 8800 GS

MacBook Pro

NVIDIA

GeForce 8800M GT

Product GPU information
GPU Acceleration in Adobe Acrobat

333447â“ GPU Acceleration support in Acrobat and Adobe Reader
324073 - Issues with an ATI video card
kb405218 - Video card list and GPU information for Acrobat 9

GPU Acceleration in Adobe After Effects

OpenGL support for After Effects

GPU Acceleration in Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player system requirements

GPU acceleration in Adobe Photoshop CS4

For information on GPU features in Photoshop, and a list of the GPU chipsets that have been tested for use with Photoshop CS4, please refer to the following documents:

kb404898 â“ GPU and OpenGL Features and Limitations in Photoshop CS4
kb405745 â“ GPU accelerated features in Photoshop and Bridge CS4
kb405064 â“ Crashes occur, Photoshop CS4 won't open, some features are slow and OpenGL is unavailable.
kb405711 â“ List of tested graphics display cards in Photoshop CS4

GPU Acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro

Third party hardware compatibility

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Document Details

ID:kb405445

Products Affected:

acrobat
aftereffects
bridge
flashplayer
photoshop
premierepro