Does Adobe Photoshop use the GPU?

Question

Do Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Premiere CS5 use the GPU? Does the choice of the graphic card change the performance of these programs?

Answer 1

According to Adobe:

Photoshop CS5 and CS4 leverage the video adapter's chip (the graphics 
processing unit, or GPU) instead of the computer's main chip (CPU) to speed 
some functions. Photoshop accesses and uses the GPU when the GPU:

- supports OpenGL, a software and hardware standard that accelerates video 
processing when working with large or complex images, including 3D.
- has at least 256 MB of RAM.
- has a display driver that supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0, 
which the GPU uses to perform rendering effects.

So yes, your choice of graphics card will quite likely affect how well Photoshop will perform. Newer higher performance cards will likely give better performance.

Answer 2

Yes. The amount of gpu would depend on what kind or how much editing you are doing.