14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has announced the release date for the upcoming Flash Player 11. The runtime is now available as a release candidate and Adobe has said that a final version is landing on October 4.
Flash Player 11 comes with quite some interesting new features and capabilities. On top of the list is the first hardware accelerated 3D graphics API for Flash, enabling developers to build full-fledged games for the multi-platform technology.
Another great addition is full support for 64-bit architectures, enabling users to run a fully compatible Flash Player on the 64-bit OSes and browsers.
There are several other, more technical updates under the hood, like support for a new compression technology for voice, H.264 video encoding and others.
The start of the show is Stage 3D, previously known as Molehill, a set of graphics APIs that makes full use of the graphic cards found in most devices, desktops, laptops, phones and tablets, to bring great looking and performing games to the web.
Flash has had a 3D graphics API for quite a while now, but it relied on the CPU, meaning that performance was abysmal while, at the same time, taking up valuable processing power on your system.
"Introducing Stage 3D, a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. It enables new classes of console-quality games and immersive apps," Adobe boasted.
"Stage 3D enables content that efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second — the result is fluid, cinematic app and game experiences," it said.
Adobe is dubbing this release of Flash Player as the "next-generation console for the web," which is a bit of a stretch, but the move is important.
Many of the online games today, on social networks like Facebook or Google+ and everywhere else, are powered by Flash Player. With Flash Player 11, all games will be able to benefit from the performance improvements, provided they are updated to use the Stage 3D APIs.
"Additionally, these releases deliver new features to support theater-quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high-quality HD video conferencing, and a powerful, flexible architecture for leveraging native device and platform capabilities," Adobe listed some of the other improvements in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.0, which is also coming on October 4.
Adobe Flash Player for Windows is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player for Mac OS X is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player for Linux is available for download here.