Adobe Flash 10.1 Ushers In GPU Accelerated Flash

Legit Review takes a look at the performance of Adobe Flash 10.1. Here's a bit:

It's easy to see in the chart above what an incredible difference Flash 10.1 makes! With Flash 10.0, SD played smoothly, while 720P lost a barely noticeable number of frames and 1080P played terribly, bogging down the entire computer so much that Internet Explorer locked up and the process had to be killed in Task Manager. Firefox had a similar locking result, though it did eventually respond on its own. A credit to Google's Chrome sandboxing approach, closing out the browser was immediate even if the video playback was the worst.

Switch forward to Flash 10.1, and the difference is light and day! CPU utilization across all three browsers was cut down to cool, easily manageable figures, while playback of all three modes was smooth and the browsers remained responsive. I was so surprised with the outcome of the 720P and 1080P tests that I reran the experiment multiple times. Of course, it begins to make sense when considering the fact that Flash 10.1 uses hardware acceleration to decompress the streaming video, meaning the CPU is largely babysitting in-memory data transfers while the GPU performs the fancy high-def work.