It has been 11 years since Windows XP was introduced. Adobe announced that the current CS6 version of Photoshop will be the last one to support the Windows XP operating system.

Here’s what Tim Hogarty, from Adobe team, said on his blog:

“The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP,”

He said that it’s because modern performance-sensitive software requires modern hardware graphics interfaces that Windows XP lacks, in particular a way to tap into the power of graphics processing units.

Here’s another quote:

” Leveraging advances available on newer operating systems and hardware allows us to deliver significantly better performance, and focus our innovation efforts around the areas of the greatest benefit to our customers.

Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers. The team hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we we’re headed with future releases of Photoshop. We encourage all customers who are currently using Windows XP to begin making their migration plans now so they can fully take advantage of future Photoshop innovations as soon as they are available. “

Adobe will provide bug fixes for Photoshop CS6. According to CNET, Windows 7 is already more popular than Windows XP. Adobe dropped support for Windows XP for Lightroom 4 already (as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts here), so Photoshop is next.