Adobe's Flash Player 10.2 to Offer Up to Ten-Fold Improvement in CPU Efficiency

[gnasher729]

Amazing what a company can do when pushed. Too bad they sat on this for years. Imagine where they'd be with Flash if they had pushed the technology all along.

I'd be willing to bet Flash's time has come and will soon be going away.

I'd say that Adobe replaced either the developers or the managers responsible for Flash. Instead of looking for reasons why improvements could not possibly be made they now seem to have people who want to improve Flash and figure out how to do it.

I think Apple providing APIs to use the GPU is not really that critical to Flash performance except that Adobe lost its excuse for bad performance, which in turn meant that either some developer or some manager within Adobe lost his or her excuse why Flash couldn't run faster.

But as you say, there can be a point when it is too late. Myself I don't _want_ Flash anymore. Too much wasted CPU and battery life, and too many crashes, so I don't _want_ to try it anymore.

Was that directed at Adobe, or at Apple for finally making the GPU available to plugins?

If you read the start of my post, it can be directed straight at Adobe. Flash struggled on 320 x 200 h.264 movies. Something that my iPod nano plays without the slightest problem. You don't need hardware acceleration for that. The slowest MacBook has two powerful CPUs that can crush any video acceleration in the iPod nano. Hardware acceleration for that kind of movie may get you from 30 percent CPU to 10 percent. But the jump from 120% to 30% is just overcoming previous incompetence or not-being-botheredness on Adobes side, and that jump is what counts.

 

[barkmonster]

Thanks Adobe. That's some pretty lame code to start with if they can do such a massive overnight improvement.

I wonder how it effects my G4?

Doubt it will but this screen shot illustrates why I don't even have a browser open if I want to run DAW software and get any advantage at all from my second CPU.

This is just 1 page of Firefox open with the video playing back, files copying between 2 partitions of the same internal drive in the background (not my boot drive) and iTunes open in the background with no audio playing.

Pretty full up on CPU usage there. I know it's an old machine but come on, it's only a small video playing back, I can handle xvid, divx and h.263/264 video playback just fine at higher resolutions without all the sluggishness.

 

[audio_inside]

Wake me up when 10.2 is out of beta and all videos in Youtube supports it.

Doesn't need encoding support on Youtube's end - the improvement's all in the playback engine. Didn't you see the same video being played back with the new and old APIs?

 

[inlovewithi]

Ok wait a sec. This isn't making flash any more efficient near as I can tell. Its just offloading the processing to the gpu so yes it looks good but unless it's more efficient it will still drain the battery and cause everything to heat up

I'm not quite sure you understand how computers work. When you watch an HTML 5 video it uses the GPU, when you watch a video on your computer, it uses the GPU. (Though I'm hearing that on Macs it was all done on the CPU because apple wouldn't release some APIs) The point is, it's supposed to use the GPU, before all the work to play a flash video was done on the CPU, that's not the case anymore. If you noticed, whenever a new popular video format was introduced, the GPU companies had to add support for it, so that software could use the GPU, else my current computer, which is plenty fast, would have to use a lot of CPU power just to play videos. If I watch a video that uses that new format that Google introduced, it would use more CPU power, because that format is not supported by current GPUs.

 

[cRuNcHiE]

What's new?

Flash still fails to reduce CPU usage, now enlists GPU to do the work.

Still fails to be efficient.

Did you even watch the video?

The before and after were BOTH gpu accelerated and the after used hardly any CPU

 

[sobeservices2]

Apple get over yourself!

APPLE GET OVER YOURSELF!

Just allow it on the phone some way..
Don't get greedy

 

[UTclassof89]

The reason why Jobs hates flash has everything to do with business. It's a competitor to their store... It's all about money, watching videos and playing free games on flash cuts into Apple's bottom line....

You nailed it.

And so very, very weird that the MR Flash-bashing crowd are STILL bashing the tenfold improvement that they've been clamoring for!?!?!?

No one thinks Flash is perfect, but this shows again it will continue to get better faster than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will.

 

[Richard1028]

I thought there was nothing wrong with Flash. Why did they need to fix it?

BTW... Is the the audio in this demo clip playing out of synch or is it me?

 

[BigMac2]

What a shocking news. More I heard about Adobe, more I hate them and I have follow Adobe since their beginning in the 80s.

The video performance is only the pinnacle of their performance problems. Even if they can do all the video processing work on the GPU, their actionscript interpreter still run like an donkey and still suck hard on power consumption.

My major issue with Flash is not the video, but with all the crappy flash Ads all over the place on the web that suck my cpu and my battery for animate 2D graphics and managing their own cookies outside any browser and cookies manager control.

Flash was made for helping bad developers producing crappy content, not for users in mind.

There is an insightful site making comparison between CSS3 ads and Flash Ads. Go check for your self:
http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/css3-ads/

 

[inlovewithi]

You nailed it.

And so very, very weird that the MR Flash-bashing crowd are STILL bashing the tenfold improvement that they've been clamoring for!?!?!?

No one thinks Flash is perfect, but this shows again it will continue to get better faster than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will.

I mean, yeah, it's so true. Some major improvements, after another major improvement, and yet pure hatred. I am so happy that as a person who likes technology, and what the future holds, I'm not just focused on what one company thinks it's good or bad. I hated flash, but with these improvements, why continue hating. I actually hate Sony as a company, but the Vaio I have right now provided the best deal, and had some things that others didn't provide. I still bought it based on the hardware, not the company.

 

[fishmoose]

Too little too late, I've uninstalled Flash already and fire up Chrome when I want to use it which is rarely tbh thanks to the excellent Safari extension YouTube5 which turns YouTube videos into HTML 5 and H.264.

 

[gnasher729]

I mean, yeah, it's so true. Some major improvements, after another major improvement, and yet pure hatred. I am so happy that as a person who likes technology, and what the future holds, I'm not just focused on what one company thinks it's good or bad. I hated flash, but with these improvements, why continue hating. I actually hate Sony as a company, but the Vaio I have right now provided the best deal, and had some things that others didn't provide. I still bought it based on the hardware, not the company.

People's attitudes towards a company are always based on both their current performance, and their goodwill. Adobe spent all their goodwill ages ago. Once it's gone, it's gone. I don't care about Flash anymore, that's it. Flash had a monopoly, that is what allowed Adobe to sit on their backsides for years. It seems that iPhone and iPad on their own managed to destroy Adobe's monopoly.

And Apple users may only be a few percent of computer users, but they are twice as many percent of home users, and they spend twice as much again on computers, so for the whole advertising market, they are much more important than Apple's market share suggests. So Adobe has been abusing that massive portion of the advertising market for years, and now they have to pay. It may be too late.

Too little too late, I've uninstalled Flash already and fire up Chrome when I want to use it which is rarely tbh thanks to the excellent Safari extension YouTube5 which turns YouTube videos into HTML 5 and H.264.

I really have to try that. Does it work automatically even with a Flash blocker in place?

 

[Žalgiris]

Too little too late. Where were they in 2007? Now it's 5 minutes till 2011.

 

[lilo777]

Now just wait for the penny to drop, that it's Windows-only, requires 8GB RAM, a $5000 graphics card or somesuch. Over-promise, under-deliver.

Correction: requires Windows (netbook) or $5000 Mac system.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Amazing what a company can do when pushed. Too bad they sat on this for years. Imagine where they'd be with Flash if they had pushed the technology all along.

I'd be willing to bet Flash's time has come and will soon be going away.

yet it can easily be pointed to say Apple put a lot of block on flash. Flash always has worked better on windows than OSX but that is Apples fault.

 

[fishmoose]

I really have to try that. Does it work automatically even with a Flash blocker in place?

Yeah, it has many advantages to a Flash blocker. John Gruber wrote a nice piece with instructions called Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It take a look at that, it's really worth it. I use Nightly Builds of Webkit and it has crashed once on me since I uninstalled Flash!

 

[0815]

You nailed it.

Nope. Apple was originally even pushing for only (free) HTML5 based content. People kept bashing about it, they added support for native apps - and same people are now bashing again that they are greedy? Guess some people just need to bash Apple, no matter what.

And so very, very weird that the MR Flash-bashing crowd are STILL bashing the tenfold improvement that they've been clamoring for!?!?!?

No one thinks Flash is perfect, but this shows again it will continue to get better faster than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will.

I'm happy about the tenfold improvement - it is a good START. If they can keep up that work, we might have some day a decent Flash that does not eat up all the resources, crashes and burns too much cycles (and battery). You know, if you start with a horrible baseline, a tenfold improvement is good, but not good enough. But I guess there is hope (hope that I almost had given up).

Also, how can you explain that they say the "Air" is underpowered for Flash, but still claim it works fine on mobile devices?

 

[Žalgiris]

Correction: requires Windows (netbook) or $5000 Mac system.

Nice try.

 

[lilo777]

And Apple users may only be a few percent of computer users, but they are twice as many percent of home users, and they spend twice as much again on computers, so for the whole advertising market, they are much more important than Apple's market share suggests. So Adobe has been abusing that massive portion of the advertising market for years, and now they have to pay. It may be too late.

There is a major flaw in this logic. Advertisers do not care how much Apple users spend on their computers. They advertise everything - not just computers. If anything, the advertisers might be less interested in Apple users because those have less money left after purchasing Apple product than Windows users Also, introduction of iPad changed this equation significantly. iPad being one of the cheapest computer options around, one can not say anymore that those who buy Apple products are the wealthier ones.

 

[Stella]

Nope. Apple was originally even pushing for only (free) HTML5 based content. People kept bashing about it, they added support for native apps - and same people are now bashing again that they are greedy? Guess some people just need to bash Apple, no matter what.

The iPhone SDK, iOS and appStore infrastructure probably wasn't ready for native apps at iPhone launch.

When all this was ready did Apple open up the iPhone for native apps.

SJ is a salesman... he's going to talk up what is available, in this case "HTML5 apps are great, no one needs native". Then SJ's speeches beacme how great native apps on iPhone are.

 

[acslater017]

Rumor? They SHOWED IT WORKING.

Maybe true/untrue is not the right word. I think most of us are hoping that the PERFORMANCE claims are accurate. My 98% of my MBP crashes are because of flash or me running out of HDD space

I've cleaned out 25 GB of videos. If Flash 10.2 is as good as they claim, my computer should have a real breath of fresh air!

 

[66318]

You nailed it.

And so very, very weird that the MR Flash-bashing crowd are STILL bashing the tenfold improvement that they've been clamoring for!?!?!?

No one thinks Flash is perfect, but this shows again it will continue to get better faster than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will.

I can't speak for others here, but I bash Adobe still because they only now are putting a priority on efficient code. Flash is at major version 10, and it's now a priority. It should have been a priority long ago, maybe 7 or 8 versions ago. If Flash is a major cornerstone to using the world wide web, then everyone has to wait on Adobe to improve things. And they proved that they wouldn't improve until they faced a major negative backlash from another major company.

HTML/CSS/JavaScript can be improved by anyone. Google is doing some amazing work in JavaScript performance with Chrome, Apple has done similar, and even Microsoft is regaining a lot of lost time by making a pretty decent modern browser engine for IE9. None of these companies have to wait around for someone else to make things better, they can do it themselves.

In my eyes, there is very little Adobe can do to redeem themselves over Flash. The momentum is already swinging away from them, this is their last ditch effort to recover after being properly drug through the mud for the past 3 years over bad performance. Performance that prevented them from shipping Flash on iOS, and performance that causes every Android owner I know to keep Flash turned off.

 

[qbert]

Amazing performance, even on that "underpowered" Macbook Air.

 

[lilo777]

Is HTML 5 dead?

Current version of Flash player is about on par with HTML5 as far as resource usage is concerned. With 10x performance increase, I wonder if it means that HTML5 is dead now.

 

[Consultant]

I tried the 10.2 and by God it's buggy as hell, not good for a Beta, it's more like an Alpha but I blame BOTH Apple and Adobe for the ridiculous mess they are in. It's disgusting the way the two company's are treating the users!

Do you know Flash fails on Google's chrome laptop too. Of course not. Blame Apple.