Nvidia, Adobe Announce GPU Accelerated Flash

By Marcus Yam
published

Now your GPU can make a Flasher out of your Ion netbook.

Adobe Systems and Nvidia today announced (again) that they are working together to bring GPU acceleration to Adobe Flash. The companies said that they have been working closely together as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and dramatically improve performance of Flash Player 10.1 for GPUs not only on netbooks, but also MIDs.

While an Nvidia GPU would be able to accelerate Flash video quite well on a Core 2 Duo-equipped machine, the companies are pushing the value of GPU acceleration with netbooks and nettops like the HP Mini 311, Lenovo IdeaPad S12, Samsung N510, Acer AspireRevo, and Asus eeeBox EB1012 – all of which are packed with the Nvidia Ion chipset.

Nvidia also pointed out that Tegra processor-based smartphones and smartbooks that start shipping later this year will accelerate vector graphics and video to enable full-screen Internet video and animation.

 “Consumers want the best Internet experience – whether it’s a mobile device in their pocket or a netbook at the coffee shop,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of Nvidia. “Our engineers have worked closely with Adobe to make this a reality.”

With the quality of Flash video constantly on the rise – now with it able to stream 720p streams over YouTube – it might only be a matter of time until Flash becomes the cross-platform codec of choice for all sorts of video delivery. Could the days of DivX, XviD, or even H.264 be numbered?

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Mr_Man
    Could the days of DivX, XviD, or even H.264 be numbered?
    I was under the impression that video embedded in Flash used normal codecs, such as the ones above. I could be wrong.
    Reply
  • pender21
    Mr_ManI was under the impression that video embedded in Flash used normal codecs, such as the ones above. I could be wrong.
    Yes the FLV container supports H.264, H.263 - Xvid codecs etc... Most Youtube videos are encoded by Youtube with a H.264 codec, hence the high CPU usage when decoding (also due to the Flash overhead).

    I would have hoped it would have been a OpenCL or Direct compute solution instead of just CUDA (it sounds like).
    Reply
  • crom
    Flash uses On2 VP6 as its main video codec, that's for most FLVs. It can also run H264, DIVX, etc with a little actionscript coding.
    Reply
  • reddragon72
    They can, but most use the On2 VP6 codec. It has better compression quality/speed. All I know is that I have downloaded HD youtube vids and converted them to 264/WMV(VC1) and Xvid all of which I matched the VP6 quality and all of them had larger files sizes. I also took raw uncompressed video and did the same thing and VP6 had better pic quality and a smaller file size. Not sure how or why, but it did.
    Reply
  • dainsane1
    that's nice an all but i would rather adobe get's their act together and make flash work properly on 64bit platforms.
    Reply
  • Amazing, now, thanks to Nvidia's GPGPU technology, you can do perfectly normal shit like viewing a simple Flash webpage even on Intel's crappy Atom CPU. FFS, any halfway decent CPU can render Flash animation, even on platforms with non-optimized versions of Flash like Linux and OSX.

    PS: Atom and Flash both suck, but this is akin to winning the Special Olympics, but needing Nvidia's help to do it.
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    Sure let me know when nvidia decides to provide plugins to speed u windows media encoder and pcsx2.
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    Sure let me know when nvidia decides to provide plugins to speed u windows media encoder and pcsx2.
    Reply
  • ravewulf
    With the quality of Flash video constantly on the rise – now with it able to stream 720p streams over YouTube – it might only be a matter of time until Flash becomes the cross-platform codec of choice for all sorts of video delivery. Could the days of DivX, XviD, or even H.264 be numbered?
    WRONG! Youtube has switched to using the h.264 codec almost exclusively, especially for the higher quality videos. The HD streams and iPhone/iTouch compatible streams are not only using h.264, but they are also using the mp4 container, not flash at all! Instead the flash player and container have been updated to allow these changes. The "flash" codec Youtube used to use is rather disappearing.

    Here is some additional info on the formats Youtube is using: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Video_quality
    Reply
  • megamanx00
    Well, they need to make a case for ION. Even if it's paird with a weak VIA CPU, if an ION netbook can smoothly watch high def flash content, while an Intel Based net book can't, then that's a leg up for nVidia.
    Reply