Flash 10.1 is finally knocking on our door and we have great expectations for this new version. A bit of beta testing we did revealed that either Adobe didn’t do that much, or they’ve just spent too many words on a huge PR campaign without obvious impact on the end user. Adobe Flash 10.1 is developed in tight collaboration of NVIDIA (means NVIDIA got their fingers everywhere, nice for them) and promises DXVA hardware acceleration of HD flash video content which is now huge problem for mobile devices and netbooks. Well, it actually promises DXVA on NVIDIA cards in one of the NVIDIA reviewer’s guides, but it also mentions Intel GMA 4500M, and not a word about ATI/AMD (which is expected).
So does it work? Of course, but most of the blabbering about how videos will fly w/o touching the CPU, using mostly the GPU acceleration, aren’t true. There is no huge drop in CPU usage on ATI/intel videocards, and those that tested performance on NVIDIA-based devices say it’s the same way there. What has improved is the framerate stability (not very obvious, but in YouTube you can see it with the info button) and the dropped frame rate, which leads to smoother playback where it wasn’t possible before. Yet the difference is really small and may go unnoticed by most users, as most people, even those with laptops, already have 2 GHz or better dual core CPU that can handle Hight Definition Flash well.
Our first benchmarks were done on ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 (around 15% drop in CPU usage in same video file, could be the fact we made clean install for it) and HD4670 (no obvious difference when changing from current stable Flash 10 and 10.1 beta versions)) – both ATI cards can handle DXVA yet they don’t show much improvement.
May be we expected too much or it’s the low-end range of videocards that will see the improvement, but we are dissapointed, as Adobe Flash 10.1 was major base for PR campaigns from both Adobe and NVIDIA. May be the later should focus on bringing on new gaming graphic cards instead of accelerating video through their budget GPUs? Actually the biggest winner of all this will probably be those using NVIDIA ION-based nettops or netbooks, as these systems seem to get a nice improvement while watching HD videos online with the help of Flash 10.1… although the experience is far from perfect.
9/10, as it doesn’t do anything for us. We’ll change it if we see it working on some other computers we are preparing right now.
Higher Twisted Rating is worse!
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