PHOTOSHOP STILL TOO SLOW? If your new Power Mac 9500 leaves you drumming your fingers while it processes filters on 100-MB files, Adaptive Solutions' PowerShop accelerator for Adobe Photoshop may be the answer.
Available now for the PCI bus, the card has four 16-digital-signal-processor chips, for a total of 64 DSPs that crunch through Gaussian blurs and color-space conversions in a matter of seconds. The PowerShop card accelerates functions to make them three to five times as fast as the Power Mac 9500's single PowerPC 604 chip. The card is also available in a NuBus version. And on NuBus-based Macs, the card ran functions 8 to 20 times as fast as the unaccelerated machines. These are serious time savings for Photoshop jockeys.
The PowerShop package accelerates the entire suite of bottlenecks in Photoshop, including imaging functions such as rotation and resizing and the full suite of blur and sharpen filters. Furthermore, the card accelerates Photo CD decompression, JPEG compression, and image transfers from Kodak's high-end digital cameras. The company is also investigating the feasibility of using the PowerShop card to speed up painting and other retouching tools in Photoshop and filters in Adobe Premiere.
With a street price of $3,000, the PowerShop isn't for dabblers, but it will likely pay for itself in no time if you spend hours each day in Photoshop. 503-690-1236.
