Adobe Flash 10.1 - GPU Accelerated Videos?!

[jayt]

I read an interesting article by Anandtech where they tested a pre-release version of Flash 10.1, which will supposedly use the GPU to decode video's from Youtube, Hulu etc. taking off less stress for the CPU. But has anyone actually tried using the new flash plug-in? The article pretty much tested it for windows based PC and netbooks. I'm curious to know how the performance gains for OS X will turn out to be. But I guess ones things for sure, we can expect a lot less heat coming from the Macbook when watching Youtube videos at high resolutions!

btw, if anyone is interested in reading the article, it can be found here:
AnandTech: AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease

 

[McBie]

Saw that yesterday, but I am going to wait until Apple releases this thru one of the Sofwtare Updates

Cheers ... McBie

 

[vansmith]

I don't have a supported GPU but I have noticed a marked improvement in terms of CPU usage. To be fair though, the CPU usage of the OS X build of Flash had nowhere to go but down. I'm hoping that this gets even better as Flash 10.1 progresses.

 

[jayt]

I'd have to agree that the Flash build on the Mac platform wasn't as fine tuned as it was with Windows, but I'm hopeful that the new flash build will decrease a lot of the heating problems that people have mentioned out there!

 

[deus_ex_machina]

I tried it and rolled it back - performance took a hit. It's beta after all.

 

[cwa107]

Knowing Adobe, this will just rob Peter to pay Paul. So instead of your CPU being flogged by Flash Player, it will be your GPU instead. Great. So, we're still sucking up battery life on laptops and heating them up just as much, but hey, we're not using the CPU!

I remember all of the hullabaloo over Acrobat Reader when they upgraded to version 6. It took four times as long to load and people were livid about it. So, did they go back and refine the code and take the bloat out of it? HECK NO! Instead, they installed a boot-time applet that would preload part of that bloat with the OS. Sure, it improved load times, but the net effect was that it used the same old bloated code and now you get the added benefit of having system resources hogged all the time, rather than just when you want to run the program. I still don't understand why the public wasn't outraged by this - especially when competing programs like Foxit Reader could do the same thing, but take a small fraction of the footprint.

 

[deus_ex_machina]

Knowing Adobe, this will just rob Peter to pay Paul. So instead of your CPU being flogged by Flash Player, it will be your GPU instead. Great. So, we're still sucking up battery life on laptops and heating them up just as much, but hey, we're not using the CPU!

Would make sense in my situation - the GPU in a Mac Mini is nothing to write home about, hence poorer performance.

 

[louishen]

I was going to give it a go but will wait.

The release notes were not clear on hardware acceleration, never explicitly mentioning OSX, but talking about Windows and smartphones.

This article just underlined my suspicions, no hardware acceleration for OS X as of yet.

Adobe Unveils Public Betas for Flash Player 10.1, AIR 2.0 - Business Center - PC World Business Center