What other applications? This indeed could be a problem, if they, too, use hardware accelerated functions. There’s also a potential problem, if you have multiple apps open that use the new unified interface libraries, as those in themselves use hardware acceleration.
Mylenium
Other applications like 3ds max, Cryengine 2 Sandbox or uv mapping application. If this should be the problem, than the acceleration implementen in Photoshop is fundamentally flawed. It’s unthinkable to be constrained by a rule where I have to close all the other apps which use gpu acceleration just so Photoshop can work correctly. This would be very sad, I have seen no application which would behave like this.
If this should be the problem, than the acceleration implementen in Photoshop is fundamentally flawed.
Umm, sorry buddy, that’s b*****t. By its nature OpenGL works on a first come, first served basis. The driver will derive its settings from the first GL-enabled application that is launched. These must not necessarily meet the requirements of other applications launched later. Guess why your graphics card even has options for different application-specific OpenGL settings? If your other apps happen to incidentally work with the same settings, then fine, so be it, but you cannot blame anyone for other apps like PS not adhering to this pattern when they have different requirements. And surely you can find warnings of "OpenGL exclusiveness to one application" in the manuals/ help files for your other tools. It’s inevitable – OpenGL provides the same address space to all applications and they are not isolated from each other in that regard. Hence you’re naturally calling for trouble by using different such apps at the same time. and no, that’s not an Adobe-specific problem. Try using Vue infinite and Maya on the same system at the same time, and you get an even bigger mess… Again: It may be inconvenient, but it’s not an implementation flaw, it’s a design limitation in OpenGL (which, however will be overcome in OpenGL 3).
Mylenium
I didn’t want to offend anybody. I’m not a coder, so this is what i see from point of view of an artist. So far in long years I didn’t encounter problem where apps would collide like this. Maybe i was just lucky not using the "right" apps.
I should also say that non of the apps I’m usually running with Photoshop use opengl acceleration. It would be nice if there would be some kind of "Refresh acceleration" button. It’s very frustrating when we finally get rotate canvas option and while you are working, at some point it just stops work because document looses acceleration.
Also it’s important to say that other Photoshop documents usually "keep" their acceleration on.
As far as I know, OpenGL 3 was already released. Will PS require update to use it, or is this only driver issue?
Thanks
I think you are confusing things here. OpenGL 3.0 is not "released" as something you can grab and install, the specs have been finalized in May or so and NVidia has some experimental hardware stuff on it. That is mostly the extend of it. It will take vendors at least another year before any application seriously uses it (optionally in most cases, for sure) and it will be available in consumer cards (only more expensive highend cards, initially, I think). How this will be implemented remains to be seen, but it is doubtful that current cards will be able to support features like adaptive shader steps, asymmetrical processing or freely definable texture resolutions, so most likely it will require real new hardware. For the time being however it is clear that OpenGL 2.1 will remain the standard for a while, so don’t expect any radical changes overnight. In the Adobe world, I wouldn’t expect anything along OpenGL 3.0 before CS6 and who knows what hardware will be on the market then….
Mylenium
I’m not confusing anything here. I’m simply not a coder, so the technical stuff goes beyond me. I was talking about my practical problems which i so far haven’t experienced with other applications and I just mentioned that ogl3 is "out".
for what it’s worth, i’ve noticed the opengl features ‘smooth scrolling and zooming’ stop working when i’ve opened multiple large (500meg+) psd files. it seems like when photoshop overloads it’s memory those features go away. i have to shutdown and restart photoshop to get them back.
I also have the feeling it has to do something with memory. They should have included some button for "refreshing" the acceleration for affected document.
If the video card runs out of memory, or the video card driver can’t handle more buffers – we have to disable GPU acceleration.
Is there any way to "refresh" it without restart of PS? I’m not very technical, but is this common to disable acceleration when memory is full? Don’t other 3d application "swap" to main memory?
Close all open documents and Photoshop will try to free up the video card resources. But that doesn’t guarantee what the video card driver will do.
We do swap to main memory – it’s pretty complex. But we require some buffer space on the video card and some buffers in the driver.
And we do disable acceleration for documents once the memory is full – that’s what this thread is about.
Could it be that when you alt tab to other application, that app will take some gpu memory than when you switch back to PS it detects (or maybe even on the background while you are in that different app) there is not enough gpu memory, it disables acceleration. But what if meanwhile that previous app automatically when switching back to PS freed the memory? Than some button like "Try to switch back acceleration for current document" would be very useful. It would be even better if we could manually control which document has acceleration and which not.
ulukai – ok, that makes little sense to me. I think it’s because I know a bit about how OpenGL drivers and memory management work, and I suspect you might not.
Photoshop is trying to do the best it can given the current OS and driver support available.
Yes, that is correct, I don’t know much about drivers, memory management and coding, but as an artist I just want it to work so that I don’t have to close all the documents and restart Photoshop every now and then. And to be honest, all I need the acceleration for is to use the rotate canvas feature.
And we do disable acceleration for documents once the memory is full – that’s what this thread is about.
this is unacceptable. photoshop must be robust. cs4 needs opengl. workflows will quickly become dependant on it, and cs4 is significantly slower than cs3 with it off. this problem happens regularly, under ordinary use. you can’t tell users to periodically "reboot Photoshop" to work around problems.
Photoshop is trying to do the best it can given the current OS and driver support available.
if your software is malfunctioning because it wants things the OS and drivers can’t provide, then your software is still malfunctioning. programmers design software to operate within the limitations of the systems they’re used on.
you’re the ones that decided to make cs4 depend on opengl, now you need to deal with it.
