Hi there bros and sis,
I think this is quite an important research to do that to clear up all confusions and misconception of the GPU acceleration in Flash Player 10.
Though a brief research has been done to clarify this, but i think i will look up on more information in this.
The first site below proven to answer most of the important questions, I have extracted few points from the site.
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/what-does-gpu-acceleration-mean.html
1. Just because the Flash Player is using the video card for rendering does not mean it will be faster. In the majority of cases your content will become slower.
… Content has to be specifically designed to work well with GPU functionality. The software rasterizer in the Flash Player can optimize a lot of cases the GPU cannot optimize, you as the designer will have to be aware of what a GPU does and adapt your content accordingly.
2. The hardware requirements for the GPU mode are stiff. You will need at least a DirectX 9 class card.
… So if Aero Glass does not work well on your machine the Flash Player will likely not be able to run well either in GPU mode
3. Pixel fidelity is not guaranteed when you use the GPU mode. You have to expect that content will look different on different machines, even colors might not match perfectly. This includes video.
4. Here is an example, left shows it running using the new gpu mode, right using the normal mode. This a video which is 320×240 pixels large showing red text and as you notice the gpu mode arguably looks better as the hardware does UV blending: (see attached picture)
5. Please do not blindly enable either new mode (gpu or direct) in your content. Creating a GPU based context in the browser is very expensive and will drain memory and CPU resources to the point where the browser will become unresponsive.
6. GPU functionality ties us together with the video card manufacturers and their drivers. Given that you can expect that a significant amount of customers will not be able to view your content if you enable this mode due to driver incompabilities, and various defects in the software stack.
Second site to further elaborate the points above : http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15710
We gave the new plug-in a shot, and while we didn’t see a huge difference in CPU usage on a Core 2 Duo E6400…
…Uro says web developers actually have to enable GPU acceleration manually in the code…
————————————————————
Sites from adobe also DIDN’T clearly document and explain this feature. (It seems they are really unsure themselves)
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb405445
Adobe recommends DirectX 9.0 or later (on Windows) and Shader Model 3.0…
…If your video display card is not detected as a supported card, GPU effects and preferences will not be visible within the application…
GeForce 9 Series
9600GT, 9800 (single GPU variant one)
————————————————————
More digging on adobe site found me this :
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/index.html
…Flash Player will use software mode for systems that do not meet the system requirements…
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player:9:Update:Full-Screen_Mode:Demos (scroll all the way down)
…Most of the demos that utilizes Hardware scaling are basically full screen videos instead of interactive contents.
————————————————————
Conclusion : The GPU acceleration is still at its very preliminary stage and we can’t depend on it for performance control. And to enable this mode, we have to use it INSIDE browser since I can’t seem to find anyone ‘answer’ to the question if this is possible to be utilize outside of a browser.
. It’s pretty straightforward.
