AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Huge Improvements under OS X
The release notes for the Flash 10.1 preview say the following about cross-platform hardware accelerated H.264 decoding support:
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.
Ouch. Linux isn’t ready and Apple isn’t open enough. That’s not to say that there aren’t major performance gains to be had.
I took the same Office clip I’d been using for all of the other tests and ran it on my Mac Pro at full screen (2560 x 1600). Using Activity Monitor I looked at the CPU utilization of the Flash Player plug-in. I compared both versions of Flash and saw a significant drop in CPU utilization:
| Hulu Full Screen (2560 x 1600) Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder | 450% | 190% |
Going from roughly 450% down to 190% (or a bit over 10% of total CPU utilization across 16 threads) made full-screen Hulu playable on my machine. In the past I always had to run it in a smaller window, but thanks to Flash 10.1 I don’t have to any longer.
With actual GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding I’m guessing those CPU utilization numbers could drop to a remotely reasonable value. But it’s up to Apple to expose the appropriate hooks to allow Adobe to (eventually) enable that functionality.
Until then, even OS X users have something to look forward to with the Flash 10.1 upgrade.
Final Words
It's finally here. GPU accelerated video decode for Adobe Flash. Grab the preview and let us know how it fares on your system in the comments.
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Doormat - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
On my old Macbook Core duo 1.83Ghz, I can watch Hulu now, both windowed and full screen. Before it was really bad....joshv - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Sorry, Flash performance on Mac sucks. I've done full screen Hulu on my relatively slow Core 2 Duo and it was smooth as silk - Windows Vista. On my current Core i7 machine I can watch full screen HD content from Hulu. Again smooth as silk - 15% CPU utilization.marc1000 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Hi guys. nice news, but I would like to ask if it is possible to do a second test on the AMD systems, because the 9.10 vs 9.11 issue. Even a quick check would suffice to let you (and us) know if it ever changes anything. Thanks,marc1000 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Sorry, I was checking the article again. In the first page you say there is NO 9.11 driver compatible right now. We will have to wait then... thanks anyway!7Enigma - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Could one of you do a quick test with the 9.11 drivers and give at least a single data point to show how well this works on the ATI parts? I know you updated to say 9.11 was required and that could be a problem, but these tests appear pretty hands-off (FRAPS), so a single episode of the Office or the HD content on YouTube shouldn't take more than an hour to run?I just don't want to see the comments section turning into another ATI/NVIDIA fanboy girl-fight, and claims of NVIDIA favoritism...
Very interested in the final version of this FLASH update. It has been WAYYYY too long in coming.
UNCjigga - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I am wondering if piping the video through the DXVA hardware decode path does anything for image quality? Do the standard Purevideo/Avivo enhancements apply? At the very least, I imagine it might "soften" resized video a bit more than the standard pixelated crap from Flash.rnj - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
actually it resulted in a signficantly quality dropAzhrei - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
So I just checked it out and on my system the video quality for hulu 480p videos at fullscreen is horrible. There is noticeable blocks that is most evident in peoples faces. I downgraded back to 10.0. I don't know if the problem was my video card's rendering or flash but on an 8800 gts 512mb it was unacceptable. I didn't check performance closely because on an i7 flash doesn't stress the CPU enough for me to care. I just checked task manager to make sure it wasn't doing something weird and pushing the CPU hard.csng - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Just tested it on my Nvidia 9600GT,running a youtube HD content, CPU utilization dropped to 25-27% compared to > 55% before using the latest flash player. However the video quality dropped and the whole scene seems washed out. Some blocky effect as mentioned as well..ioannis - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
it might be just gamma settings. Try reducing gamma for video from the nvidia settings.