Flash 10.2 to Bring 10X Video Performance Boost on PC and Mac

Adobe recently debuted the Flash Player 10.2 Beta 2. Among the new features to expect in the next major update to the popular plugin is broader support for hardware acceleration, especially for video content. All of this was known, but Adobe's John Nack is touting the performance boost this provides claiming that it can lead to a 10 times reduction in CPU load, in some circumstances.

Again, there's nothing particularly surprising about that, with hardware acceleration, the GPU takes over and handles many of the tasks the CPU would have had to do.

With Flash Player 10.2, much of the video rendering process is delegated to the GPU, so, with nothing left for the CPU to do, usage is going to drop significantly.

"Flash Player didn’t start out trying to become the world’s most popular video player, but life takes some interesting turns. Instead of just playing linear media files, Flash makes video part of a flexible rendering pipeline," Nack, Principle Product Manager for Photoshop, explains.

This a complex process, he explains, so it's understandable that it takes its toll on performance.

Fortunately, he says, the upcoming version of the Flash Player, moves the full video rendering process to the GPU, which was designed to handle this type of tasks much better than a regular CPU, and does a better separation of video content from the rest of the Flash graphics, which are also hardware accelerated.

With Stage Video, the name of the new API in Flash Player 10.2 which enables developers to take full advantage of the GPU, CPU usage can drop to almost zero in some cases and should result in better performance on all devices.

Nack highlights a video from the Adobe MAX developer's conference which showcases the new API. Of course, this is on Adobe's home turf, but it's still pretty impressive.

CPU usage drops significantly with the new API, when playing video alone, but, more importantly, it also stays low when adding other Flash graphics on top of the video, enabling developers to do more interesting things with video content.