Adobe Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 are the latestsoftware applications that harness the power of GPUs to improve performance and image quality.

Both the Adobe Acrobat 8 product family and Adobe Reader 8 now offer a new page display rendering mode, which uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to accelerate the drawing and display of pages in PDF format.

"NVIDIA GeForce and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs let users do more with PDF files, and faster," said Pam Deziel, director, platform product marketing, Adobe Systems Incorporated. "Panning, scrolling, zooming?Virtually every major function in Adobe Reader 8 that takes advantage of the GPU will receive a tangible boost in performance. Things people may have avoided in the past, such as deeply detailed zoomable maps, are now easily displayed."

Enabled only on modern, powerful GPUs, the feature "2D GPU ACCELERATION" enhances the interactivity of page display and allows fluid zooming and panning of complex documents. This results in a performance boost, as well as sharper display of text and imagery while zooming through large documents. The ability of the GPU to display PDF files in such an interactive manner enables truly fluid handling of electronic documents, whether they be subway maps, architectural blueprints, trail maps, or lengthy catalogs and e-books.

More information on Adobe Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8, including a list of supported GPUs, can be found at www.adobe.com.