Steve
Jobs wowed the Seybold audience last August with demos of
the then new G4 machines running lightning fast Photoshop
filter operations. Nothing spelled out the power of the G4
processor and AltiVec, oops... Velocity, instruction set better.
The good news was that every G4 machine from Apple would ship
with an AltiVec plugin for Photoshop 5.5. The plugin is what
allows Photoshop to make use of the new AltiVec instruction
set on the G4. The bad news was that, until recently, buying
a new G4 machine was the only way to get the plugin If you
bought a G4 upgrade you were left out in the cold. XLR8
developed their own Photoshop plugin which provides impressive
results. Unfortunately, their plugin is limited to Photoshop
versions 3.x and 4.x. Thankfully, Adobe made their plugin
publicly available
as of today, December 10th, 1999. Merry Christmas! Before
today's release there was hope and speculation that Adobe's
plugin would cover all versions of Photoshop 5. Unfortunately
only 5.5 is supported and Adobe states that G4 upgrade cards
cards are not officially supported.
"You must use Photoshop 5.5 or later to take advantage
of these plug-ins. Earlier versions of Photoshop will not
support these plug-ins. Also note that Adobe tested these
plug-ins for compatibility only with Power Macintosh G4 computer
s manufactured by Apple, and Adobe cannot make any guarantees
regarding compatibility with third-party G4 upgrade cards."
- Adobe's AltiVec plugin download page.
Performance Gains
What kind of performance gains are we looking at? To give
you an idea, we have included a few test results from our
review of XLR8's MACh Carrier G4 card. Bear in mind that these
scores are from Photoshop 4.0 but from what we have seen it
is fair to assume these performance gains are on par with
what you can expect in 5.5. These results are from "stopwatch"
tests and are set relative to our stock 9500 which is assigned
a score of 100%. Obviously, lower numbers and shorter bars
are better. We ran our tests both with and without the plugin
supplied by XLR8 and as you can see using the plugin makes
a marked difference!
Areas Of Improvement
There are several areas besides the ones above where you
should note significant improvements. Specific operations
mentioned at the Adobe site:
The optimized lighting effects plugin provides faster
rendering of 3D lighting effects.
Distortion plug-ins like polar coordinates, ripple, spherize,
and twirl show dramatic speed increases.
Layer blend modes like normal, lighten, and hard light
offer vastly improved responsiveness when painting or compositing.
Image transformations such as resize and rotate can now
be done in half the time.
Widely used filters such as Gaussian blur and unsharp
mask perform significantly faster.
Color correction functions like curves and levels also
perform noticeably quicker.
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Steve
Jobs wowed the Seybold audience last August with demos of
the then new G4 machines running lightning fast Photoshop
filter operations. Nothing spelled out the power of the G4
processor and AltiVec, oops... Velocity, instruction set better.
The good news was that every G4 machine from Apple would ship
with an AltiVec plugin for Photoshop 5.5. The plugin is what
allows Photoshop to make use of the new AltiVec instruction
set on the G4. The bad news was that, until recently, buying
a new G4 machine was the only way to get the plugin If you
bought a G4 upgrade you were left out in the cold. 
