Does Photoshop Elements use the GPU?

Question

I cannot find a difinitive statement as to whether Photoshop Elements uses the GPU or not. I am about to buy a new computer and I am trying to determine if I should spend the money to get a higher end graphics card or not. The two options in the computer I am looking at are the Nvidia Quadro K1000M and K2000M, both with 2Gb. The K2000M is $250 more and I need to decide if it will provide better performance with Elements. Thanks.

Answer 1

Some software use the computer’s GPU (addition to or in place of the CPU) in order to complete its given task in a shorter period of time. Photoshop is an example of one of these applications; it uses the GPU instead of the CPU to complete its tasks faster. 3DS Max is another example. It uses all available cores to render faster.
Now you might be thinking those all have to do with graphics... Well... Doesn’t imovie have to do with graphics, too? I mean utilizing the GPU to encode video is a good idea IMO. Even if you don’t associate iMovie with graphics, and somehow think it’s impossible for it to ever take advantage of a GPU, what about the other software that’s completely unrelated to graphics and video encoding? The legality or intentions of the software is questionable... (ie wireless network auditing) But regardless, it still takes advantage of the GPU to accelerate its tasks to incredible speeds. If stuff like that can do it, why can’t a program designed for processing video do it?
Anyway, I won’t be able to tell you if adobe makes NTSC discs or not. I already have toast 10 which I just discovered it burns NTSC DVD discs and even Blu Ray video discs without returning a demuxing error every other video. And to think it was only useful for burning data discs. It doesn’t use the GPU either, but it seems to encode DVD video considerably faster than iDVD.