Great speeds with Flash 10.0.22.87 on PowerPC G4

I have been spending much of the day trying different combinations of OS X 10.4, 10.5, safari (and other browsers) and flash. The reason being that my Son has an imac G4 1.25ghz and I want it to be able to run "club penguin" well. I noticed that after the leopard 10.5.8 update, flash performance was incredibly good, but then after I applied the newer updates (including safari 5) it dropped back to it's usual crawl. I've spent a frustrating day trying everything (including re-installs) to find out what caused the change. Before I upgraded the machine to leopard, I also tried many different combinations of flash player/browser on tiger OS X 10.4.

Using the http://www.clubpenguin.com homepage as a test, I was very surprised to find that flash 10.0.22.87 on Safari 5 is by far the fastest. The difference is night and day against any other flash version that I've tried between 8.0 and the latest 10.1.

The difference really is dramatic. Give it a try if you are having problems with flash and if you do, please post with your findings, as I'd like to know if sites other than club penguin are also improved.

For the record, I tested this with a 17" iMac G4 - 1.25ghz - 1.5GB ram.

So, here's some links to make things easier...

- update safari to latest version using software update.
- uninstall flash
- download archived flash 10.0 and install flashplayer10r22_87_ub_mac.pkg

Please let me know what you find. I haven't tested every version and combination, buy I've tested A LOT.

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I've also found a dramatic speed boost for online flash games by downloading the .swf and inserting it into a standalone flashplayer (to be launched from finder).

This, combined with v10.0.22.87, makes a massive difference. It basically makes previously unplayable games playable. Now my Son can play his favourite bubblebox games on his imac g4.

I think I might start a new "How to play flash games on powerPC" thread with a roundup of all the tricks that people can find to make them work at the best possible speed.

Thanks.

That's interesting. Not long ago I found flash 8 resulted in very smooth youtube videos on a 700mhz G4 mac. But it breaks just about every other flash site. I will try the latest version as you recommend.

If you want good video performance but there are also a few flash games/apps that you really want, I suppose a good workaround would be to install flash 10.1 to your browser extensions and downoad the flash swf games to be imbedded into a v10.0.22.87 standalone player.

Thank you both. I hope you find it helpful.

I think if flash video is more important to you but there are still a few games/apps you want to play, downloading the swf file and putting it in a standalone flash player is definitely the way to go. Running as standalone made an even greater speed improvement than changing the flash version did. I'll put up a full guide for this soon.

Skinniezinho, I have not tried tenfourfox. Thank - I'll give it a try.

Thanks a lot Tony. That's interesting that you are also finding the best results with Safari.

Just thinking aloud here...

Perhaps mabaker having worse results for video is due to him being unable to run Safari 5? Seing as (unless he has 'forced' an OS X 10.5 install) his 800mhz G4 only allows for OS X 10.4 to be installed, and therefore only allows upto Safari 4.

Tenfour is optimised for 10.4 afterall and, having recently tried many versions, I have a feeling that Safari updates are quite beneficial for speed - even on powerPC macs.

Okay, I've just had a bit of a Clive-ax.

Thanks for that website mabaker (although I feel slightly brainwashed by the flashing images). I have carried out a few tests, and there are a few things worth mentioning about them...

I noticed that giving an FPS value on it's own would not mean very much. Window size has a great effect on frame-rate due to the rendering area. Even things like the menu and tabs bar made a noticeable difference to the results. For fairness, and because people rarely view Flash at full screen, before I ran the below tests I Maximised the window at two different resolutions - The only reason being to easily adjust a smaller window size with consistence. I noticed that TenFourFox had the largest top menu and therefore the smallest page rendering area. So I carefully resized the other browsers vertically to make the viewable page the exact same pixel height as it is in TenFourFox. All browsers had an identical horizontal page width.

I ran three tests for each browser and calculated the average FPS. In each test I closed all programs except for Finder, Textedit (to record the results) and the appropriate browser currently at test. I also let the animation play through a while each time before I clicked the "test" button - so that there was no hdd access or any other activity that could void the result. When I uninstalled/reinstalled to flash 10.1, I restarted the computer. I also tested the flash clip's performance when it was embedded in it's own flash player (using the appropriate FlashPlayer version to build the .app) - the results found here are especially interesting.

All tests were ran in the last hour or so on an iMac G4, 1.25GHZ, 1.5 GB, running Leopard (version 10.5.8).

http://www.craftymind.com/factory/guimark/GUIMark_Flex3.html


Interesting results. The latest flash (10.1.102.64) clearly had the edge. As did Safari 5.

The test SWF animation benefits from Flash 10.1 by about 17%. To be honest, this needs looking into further. I didn't start this thread for nothing and the difference flash 10.0 made to some of my Son's favourite games is around 300% over the speed of flash 10.1! For this reason, after I ran these tests, I checked clubpenguin again to make sure I wasn't going mad and, using v10.1.102.64, it was a dreadful crawl ...So I went back to v10.0.22.87.

Another interesting result is that standalone flash players 10.0 and 10.1 had practically identical results.

MacHamster68 said:

my above iMac achieved average with
tenfourfox 4.26fps
with
safari 3.42 fps
doesn't sound a lot , but i promise you with a G3 700mhz and 16mb graphics card that is quiet a lot and near 1 fps more make a big difference too

btw i did for fun the test on my core duo iMac in the sig
21.23 fps in firefox , does that mean my iMac core duo is just 5 times faster witha 1.83 ghz core duo processor and a 128mb graphicscard and 2 gb ram ..what a progress

Click to expand...

That's a 20% increase. It's definitely worth sticking with TenFourFox. My inclusion of TenFourFox on my tests was a bit unfair. Seeing as I'm not running OS X Ten.Four, so I am not running the OS that it is optimised for.

For anyone running 10.5 though, I haven't yet found any reason not to use Safari - even on a powerPC.

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That website was a pretty intensive test for old processors. I've been thinking about this and I wonder whether 10.1's better results are related to this intensity.

When I noticed an improvement with Flash 10.0.22.87, it was most dramatic during 'smaller' flash animations and GUI usage. An example would be 'Cover Orange', a puzzle game on BubbleBox (my Son loves this game). At the beginning of a level, you point and click to place objects. On flash 10.1 this lags very badly, but on Flash 10.0 it is many times smoother. It completely transforms the game. When you've finished placing objects, a cloud passes through the screen dropping solid acid rain. During this moment, while you watch the physics based animation, things get a bit slower.

I wonder if...

- During the non-intensive GUI section, flash 10.0 is several hundred percent faster than Flash 10.1.
- During the intensive section, flash 10.1 is ~17% faster than 10.0.

Now considering the less intensive part is the important bit that you actually interact with, and it also makes up the majority of the game; in this case flash 10.0 is the obvious winner. Most 2D games are designed this way, which is why 10.0 is generally a good choice for Flash games.

But in situations where constant intensive Flash animation is used. Flash 10.1 has the edge.

...Just my current theory.

I tried a couple of different flash benchmarks and 10.1 keeps beating 10.0.

I suppose it just depends on the game. 10.0 must just have some magic inside for Club penguin and a few other sites, but 10.1 has the edge in more situations.

There are a few things that I have learnt over all this though...

- If you have a G4 and you can run 10.5, Safari 5 is the browser of choice for flash sites.
- Where possible, downloading the SWF of your favourite game and putting it in a standalone flashplayer.app gives a massive performance boost. Around double fps in most cases.
- My G4 iMac can handle flash. ...With a bit of fiddling.

No, I've never seen that thread before. And no, I didn't test Opera. It sounds like it's worth a try next time I tinker with it.

Thanks for all the advice and information you've provided mabaker.

By the way, what's your opinion of the club penguin paradox? Do you know of any circumstances where 10.1 actually performed worse than 10.0? Could Club Penguin be using a function in it's code that is known to cause problems? ...Problems that for whatever reason were absent in 10.0.