In June it was revealed that NVIDIA and Adobe were working together to bake GPU acceleration into Adobe’s Flash for ION-based netbooks. The official debut of these efforts wasn’t until October 5, but a working example was recently posted to YouTube.
The demo has since been taken offline (being a leak and all), but the GPU acceleration permitted an ION netbook to smoothly decode a 720p Flash video without issue. In comparison, an Atom-based netbook with no GPU Flash acceleration frequently stuttered when performing the same task.
GPU offloading for Flash content is the next stage of the industry’s H.264 decoding movement which began years ago. While GPUs–even integrated ones–have offered H.264/MPEG-4 acceleration for some time, Flash could not be accelerated as its implementation of H.264 was unrecognized by GPUs.
It is unclear if Adobe is working with other vendors to extend this support to the desktop and non-ION GPUs.
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