14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of interesting announcements were made this week, starting off with the release of AMD's much-anticipated Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, a dual-GPU monster that can barely fit your ATX chassis and delivers the highest level of performance currently available on the market. However, in case you have missed it, there was also an announcement made about Adobe's Flash Player 10.1, a Beta solution that is scheduled for commercial release sometime in the first half of next year, providing users with some new features for Flash video playback.
On that note, both NVIDA and AMD have been quick to announce their support for the new Flash release, by offering new graphics drivers for their lines. These drivers should enable users of some Radeon and GeForce products to support the Beta release of Adobe's Flash Player 10.1, which is said to improve memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage and rendering/scripting performance.
Following the release of the new drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD, there were a series of reports on the performance of the Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 on existing hardware. Curios by nature, we were also interested in finding out how the new Flash will improve everyday computing, especially since Flash is becoming an increasingly important component of the today's Internet pages. This lead us to the small ASRock IONPro 330 nettop, which is essentially a small-sized PC that combines Intel's dual-core Atom 330 processor with NVIDIA's integrated ION graphics.
There's a good reason to the choice we made. Intel's Atom processors are known for their poor performance, especially when dealing with Flash videos. With YouTube having recently introduced the support for 1080p videos, users will be looking for hardware solutions that can provide a high-quality web experience. NVIDIA's ION chip is said to do just that, namely help the dual-core Atom 330 processor deliver a good computing experience in the same price range as other netbooks or nettops currently available on the market.
With that in mind, we proceeded onto the test of NVIDIA's ION chipset and its performance with the Beta Flash 10.1 There are a couple of steps one needs to follow, in order to fully enjoy the benefits enabled by the new technology. First off, you have to be sure that your PC's configuration is compatible with the minimum requirements for Flash 10.1 Beta-support. Secondly, you will need to do an un-install of the previous Flash 10 and then download and install the Flash 10.1 from this website, or following the link, right here on Softpedia. In addition, if your system uses an NVIDIA GPU, you'll need to download the latest GeForce drivers, or Catalyst software suite, if you're using a Radeon-based system.
Flash 10.1 Beta Experience on NVIDIA ION
NVIDIA was very keen on letting us experience Flash 10.1 on their GPUs, which is why they had a couple of useful video links that we could use to see the difference between Flash 10, running on the CPU and 10.1, using the GPU. We decided to use the company's own 'PureVideo HD 1080p Test' video on YouTube, which is available in both 720p and 1080p variants. This video also lets us enable a function called show video info, which basically provides detailed information about the video's frame rate and other statistics.
Now, without a fresh install of Adobe's Flash 10.1, you shouldn't even consider taking the video to 1080p. That will most certainly block your system and a restart might be required. As a matter of fact, when we went to 1080p, we couldn't do anything else than stare at a non-responsive screen that was in this state for the entire duration of the playback. In 720p mode, things are a bit better, but the overall system response is totally undesirable. The dual-core Atom 330 processor goes up to 85% load, with a minimum of 75%.
Since we couldn't really play with 1080p on the Atom processor, we decided that it will be more appropriate to test the system on a 720p video, namely the one below:
This video also allowed us to enable the 'Show Video Info' functions, thus providing us with some numbers on the overall performance.
After installing Flash 10.1, we ran the two videos again and were pleasantly surprised with the results. In 720p mode, the NVIDIA ION GPU managed to run the video at about 28 to 34FPS with a CPU usage of between 16 to 20%. Without 10.1, the Atom processor was giving numbers like 24FPS to 29FPS with a CPU usage of between 75 to 85%. Following these tests, we decided to try the 1080p video once more. To our surprise, the GPU was running the 4-minute long video at 28FPS to 31PFS, with the CPU loaded to a maximum of 25%.
These numbers were enough to convince us that both NVIDIA and Adobe need to rush things up with the development of Flash 10.1. This solution should enable PC users to enjoy a better PC experience, both on the Internet, but also offline, with support for Full-HD movies on HTPCs. We should note that the system was running on Microsoft's 32-bit Windows 7 operating system.
As for AMD, we weren't able to find something that met the minimum requirements for running and testing Flash 10.1. However, we quickly went online to see if someone else was able to do a comparative test between the current GPU solutions on the market, that are eligible for running the Flash 10.1 player. We found an interesting article on Anandtech, which wasn't at all pleased with what AMD had to offer. UPDATE: Our collegues over at Anandtech have updated their article on Flash 10.1 with details on both AMD and Intel GPUs. We will be doing our own set of tests on an AMD platfform real soon, so please stay tuned for more details.
We won't make any judgments regarding AMD's support for Flash 10.1 Beta until we have a chance to see for ourselves what the chip maker can provide in terms of performance.