With the recent launch of its CS4 software, Adobe and Nvidia have teamed up to deliver graphics acceleration in several applications, including Photoshop. Details here.

Premiere Pro CS4 users with Quadro professional GPUs will also be able to grab Elemental's RapiHD plug-in, which uses CUDA to speed up high-definition video encoding significantly. According to Nvidia, compressing a two-hour high-definition video to H.264 can take around 28 hours on a CPU, but RapiHD can cut that to just 2.5-3 hours.

With the exception of RapiHD, all of the aforementioned features require only GeForce FX or better graphics cards with 512MB of memory. Those features uses the traditional graphics rendering pipeline, too, so owners of AMD GPUs should have no trouble enjoying the same goodies. Nvidia does boast that it co-developed some of the GPU acceleration elements with Adobe, however, and it expects to see CUDA-based Photoshop CS4 plug-ins come out over the next two months.