gpuViewer is a photo viewer that makes use of the GPU on your graphics card and the multiple cores in your processor to speed up the interface and let you review your library faster. Drawing on technology and methods used in video-games engines, gpuViewer is about smooth interaction and a quick feedback loop.

In october 2006, tired of waiting in front of “loading” or “refining” signs, I felt modern hardware should be able to do a faster job at displaying photos than what was available. When people asked “what’s the best graphics card to use with Photoshop?”, the quick answer used to be “doesn’t matter: it doesn’t use advanced features of graphics cards”, how crazy is that? When Aperture came out, I thought times were changing and that GPU (Graphics Processing Units) would become the norm almost overnight. But not. Products like Lightroom still mostly use good old techniques and, when working with large files, it shows.

Armed with knowledge gathered during my game development years, I set out to write a viewer that would make use of the GPU and would also leverage multi-core architectures to do work in the background. After six month, results are starting to surface and I’ve reached the point where I’m happy to show a first tech demo that proves my point even though things can be made even faster still.

The future of gpuViewer includes features to help in finding photos easily, in backing things up, in uploading to various sites and generally to alleviate as much of the frustrating stuff as possible and free us to simply enjoy our photos !

Download the current tech preview from the download section now !

Comments, suggestions and encouragements welcome :