Photoshop CS6 Beta released, with magnetic timeline!

[Liam Hall]

It looks fantastic. I hope they saved some of the awesome juice for new PP.

Liam Hall
Director/DoP/Editor
http://www.liamhall.net

[Andrew Richards]

[Steve Connor] “Photoshop CS6 Beta released, with magnetic timeline!”

You beat me to it!

But seriously, this is interesting stuff:

1. PS is now underpinned by Mercury Engine and therefore runs on CUDA juice. This is very disruptive in terms of Mac GPUs, way more than PPro is. There are a hell of a lot more PS users than there are PPro users, I’d wager. Particularly on the Mac. Did Apple know this was coming? Could this be a factor in the rumors of a return to NVIDIA for new Macs? This summer holds a lot of promise for new Macs with Ivy Bridge in MacBooks and iMacs and the new Xeons for a new Mac Pro. If we get exclusively AMD GPUs and no Mac Pro this year it will be bad mojo for Mac-centric creative pros well beyond the video realm.

2. Those in-line re-sampling selectors make me very happy, I wish I had them all along.

3. I’m curious to see how this new DRM/Licensing thing plays out. I know there was a great gnashing of teeth about the new licensing model back when it was first announced, particularly with regard to how upgrade pricing would be treated (though I haven’t followed it since to know if it has been adjusted).

4. Some of the new features in that video strike me as feature creep. I know why video editing is there, photogs dipping toes in the video waters with their ubiquitous DSLRs, but it looks awkward at first glance. Same goes for the vector and text editing stuff. Isn’t video, vector, and text layout what Premiere Pro, Illustrator, and InDesign are for? I guess this is for the Photoshop user who needs to work with vectors and text and video on the periphery but wouldn’t be doing dedicated video, vector, and text layout work. I dunno. Mixed feelings.

5. 64-bit only! So the Macs that can’t run Lion also can’t run CS6. There are also features on the Windows side that won’t work in XP at all. Progress!

Best,
Andy

[Bobby Mosca]

The rumor mill did put out news of a return to Nvidia, but more lately towards integrated Intel graphics, at least in the MBP. (There has been complete silence on a MacPro. I don’t know what that means, but if no one is working on it, there is no one to leak info.) Anyway, if Mountain Lion will include external GPU support via Thunderbolt, we can attach whatever we want, upgrade at will, and that would be great!

Now, if Mountian Lion STILL won’t support it, well…. HP for all?

[Andrew Richards]

[Bobby Mosca] “Anyway, if Mountain Lion will include external GPU support via Thunderbolt, we can attach whatever we want, upgrade at will, and that would be great!”

Thunderbolt wil need to get a lot faster for an outboard GPU to offer up all its available power. And by faster, I mean at least double or quadruple the speeds of Thunderbolt 1.0.

Thunderbolt is a great step up from FW800 for MacBooks and iMacs, but a replacement for PCIe slots, it ain’t. By a long shot.

Best,
Andy

[Tony West]

It makes sense there as in X to me.

Yeah, go ahead and close that gap.

I don’t want a hole there.

Fill it : )

[Gary Huff]

[Bobby Mosca]The rumor mill did put out news of a return to Nvidia, but more lately towards integrated Intel graphics, at least in the MBP.

That concerns the lower-end graphics processing. NVIDIA was originally supposed to provide both solutions, but they are apparently having issues with the Kepler platform and so they are (rumored to be) suggesting Apple stick with the Intel/Dedicated combo for the higher end MBP and Intel-only for the low end.

More here.

[Bobby Mosca]

Well, that Red Rocket demo that came up a little while ago seemed to work pretty well. Here’s the link again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKx-cr4bi74

Am I missing something?

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[Andrew Richards]

[Bobby Mosca] “Well, that Red Rocket demo that came up a little while ago seemed to work pretty well”

Hmm, that is really impressive. Makes me wonder about the Red Rocket’s specs. Why do they call for minimum PCIe 2.0 8x if it can be happy with half as much bandwidth via Thunderbolt?

GPUs, particularly the high-end ones that would be desirable for NLE co-processing, often saturate 8-16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (at least when they are driving big displays along with doing traditional GPU-intensive tasks). Thunderbolt 1.0 is essentially bandwidth-equivalent to 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Maybe if they are not driving monitors and are only being used as GPGPUs it would be plenty of pipe, but it would probably depend on the card and the application.

Intel has said that Thunderbolt’s next rev will live atop PCIe 3.0 and could double the bandwidth. Then we might have something.

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Good show, Steve.

Pretty hilarious.

[Bobby Mosca]

Yeah, the Red Rocket is a monster. (It better be for $4750.) I’m not sure how it differs from a typical graphics card, though, as it’s designed for Redcode That could have something to do with it. But there is an awful lot of data going back and forth in the demo. I’d like to see a demo with an Nvidia card to see if the same setup would help PPro’s playback engine. As you say, we may have to wait for the TB upgrade for it to be generally applicable.