Adobe to launch Creative Suite 5 April 12

A spokesperson for Adobe told Betanews this afternoon that on the morning of April 12 at 11:00 a.m. EDT, the company will hold a global online launch event for all of the components of its Creative Suite 5.

Among the most anticipated new components -- or as Adobe tends to present them in its periodic table, "elements" -- is a vastly improved HD video rendering engine called Mercury. Unlike other manufacturers, Adobe tends to retain the cool names for its products and platforms even after public release. Mercury will utilize the graphics processing power of video cards to expedite the decoding and playback of HD-encoded formats, especially for the Premiere Pro editor.

But not just all video cards...specifically, Nvidia cards, by virtue of a development deal between Nvidia and Adobe. High-performance rendering will be made possible through the CUDA language developed by Nvidia, rather than the OpenCL language embraced by ATI and parent AMD. As former Tom's Hardware journalist Theo Valich speculated last December, the reasons for this decision could be practical and not just political: "While AMD will tell you that they're all for open standards and push OpenCL, the sad truth is that the company representatives will remain shut when you ask them about the real status of their OpenCL API," Valich wrote. This is true, he continued, even when lead developers for software projects complain to ATI about the availability of drivers.

Another anticipated element in the CS5 suite is the premiere of Flash Catalyst, an alternative development engine for Flash applications geared more to designers and graphic artists -- more of a competitor to Microsoft's Expression Studio.