Nvidia has announced the production release of CUDA 2.0, the latest version of its C language programming environment that enables software developers to tap into the massively parallel architecture of GPUs and accelerate their applications. There are several new bits and pieces included in the package, such as a source code examples and new compiler optimizations.

Most interestingly, however, a Photoshop plug-in example has been included which provides guidelines on how to design plug-ins that run on the GPU. According to the Nvidia, the plug-in will let developers "move the most compute-intensive functions of Adobe Photoshop to the GPU" and achieve "dramatic performance improvements."

The announcement is in line with rumors earlier this year claiming that the next version of Photoshop would include GPU acceleration, and could be an indication that collaboration between Nvidia and Adobe is further along than we think. This latest release of CUDA offers support for both 32 and 64-bit Windows Vista and Mac OS X and is available for download at www.nvidia.com/cuda.