AMD Fusion APU Get Flash Player 10.2 Hardware Acceleration, Enables 1080p Playback

AMD and Adobe have recently announced that the company's recently released Fusion APUs fully support hardware acceleration for Flash videos and are able to playback content encoded at resolutions as high as 1080p.

Flash video files playback is one of the most taxing tasks that a CPU can run and low-power processors, like Intel's Atom, have a really hard time delivering adequate frame rates even at non-HD resolutions such as 480p.

However, if a GPU is installed inside the system, the video decoding task can be offloaded to the graphics core, lighting the load on the CPU.

And this is exactly what AMD and Adobe have done for Fusion as the APU can now offload the Flash decoding procedure to the on-die GPU.

The entire process is made possible by Adobe's StageVideo API, which is compatible with a wide range of devices and browsers and enables hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline.

“AMD and Adobe worked together to enable AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology through Flash Player 10.2 to bring users an enriched, more vivid video experience,” said John Taylor, director of Client Product and Software Marketing, AMD.

“Adobe continues to work towards ensuring top-notch delivery of web and video content, and remains the number one video platform on the web today.

“By harnessing the power of hardware acceleration, the new player delivers video that looks and performs better than ever before,” concluded the company's rep.

In addition to the Fusion APUs, the technology also supports other AMD Radeon graphics cards, including discrete GPUs starting with the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series.

Mobile and integrated GPUs are also supported, starting with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 and the ATI Radeon HD 3000 series, respectively, together with a wide range of ATI FirePro graphic accelerators.