Adobe Flash 10.2b Makes Better Use of Your GPU
Put that graphical muscle to good use!
The current version of Adobe Flash at 10.1 offloads some of the internet video rendering to the GPU, but not all of it. Flash 10.1 offloaded H.264 decoding to hardware, and now in the next iteration at 10.2, now in beta, Adobe is moving the entire video rendering pipeline to the GPU.
This means that the video hardware will take care of video decode as well as color conversion, scaling, and blitting. With this sort of load put on the GPU, this means that CPU utilization for even 1080p video will be almost nothing.
This is thanks to a new API called Stage Video, which is already being used in Google TV for playback of HD Flash videos.
Stage Video works across different browsers and platforms and will work with all existing video and SWF files.
The current beta is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Windows users get the bonus of Internet Explorer 9 hardware acceleration support.
Of course, we don't recommend anyone other than developers and the most adventurous of users to install this until it's out of beta.

Really? Are we talking of damage that cant be undone? I mean I'm not having my wife install it because she doesnt know how to uninstall the random BS apps she installs and I hate having to deal with her constant talking... And she really doesnt care about CPU usage or even know what a CPU is let alone how to see how much it uses. I give her shiny buttons and she clicks on them, end of story.
So anyone caring about CPU usage (I'd think most of tomshardware community) could manage uninstalling the app if it caused problems...
Really? Are we talking of damage that cant be undone? I mean I'm not having my wife install it because she doesnt know how to uninstall the random BS apps she installs and I hate having to deal with her constant talking... And she really doesnt care about CPU usage or even know what a CPU is let alone how to see how much it uses. I give her shiny buttons and she clicks on them, end of story.
So anyone caring about CPU usage (I'd think most of tomshardware community) could manage uninstalling the app if it caused problems...
I didn't actually notice much CPU usage anyway, but this should definitely help with any future HTPC's i build, just chuck in a cheap CPU and a 8400GS or something (Well i have one lying around anyway) and there you go, a system with Full HD playback for internet content!
Probably not, unless Broadcam releases an update for all products; which isn't likely to happen since only OEMs use the chips in laptops and they don't like to do anything for you after you bought the laptop. (Unless you bought their warrenty plans, then they try even less)
Hardware accelleration is a nice feature for them to add but I don't think it will be able to compete with HTML5. Whatever is already in Flash makes it load slower. I don't know why but a 1080P HD video on youtube in Flash needs to be paused to download on a 25Mbps connection while HTML5 doesn't.
I just think Adobe doesn't see that they need to make Flash more of a lite program like it was back in the days of Macromedia and stop bloating it.
even integrated graphics makes a very large difference in speed over browser rendered HTML5 graphics. Try Minefield 4.0b8 or IE9/PP7 vs. Chrome or Opera in the MS Test Drive speed tests. Firefox/Minefield and IE9 leave the others in the dust. I think GPU acceleration will make a big difference for nearly everyone, even those with modest GPUs.