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Compilation Matters: Despite the meteoric rise of generative AI services, traditional image editing tools like Photoshop still dominate the creative industry. So much so that Microsoft – now largely focused on cloud services and AI models – is working hard to find new ways to make Windows-based applications run faster.
Thanks to a close collaboration with Adobe, Microsoft engineers have significantly improved performance in certain Photoshop operations. Photoshop is a large, native desktop application written in C++ and compiled with Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler on Windows, which is why Microsoft focused on MSVC in an effort to extract additional performance from one of the world's most widely used image editing applications.
Microsoft explained that the collaboration targeted real-world customer scenarios involving CPU-intensive operations. Many complex image processing workloads are now handled – or in some cases "accelerated" – by the GPU. However, some latency-sensitive tasks, such as brush responsiveness, stroke input, and file-opening operations, still depend heavily on a CPU's raw performance.
