Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 Test - An Improvement

So now that Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 is out, I decided to give it a go on my Acer Aspire Revo AR1600 (single core Atom 230, NVidia ION) nettop. Through the first half of the video I didn’t notice any real improvement over Beta 1 (aside from slightly better performance in full screen mode perhaps) but then somehow CPU usage dropped below 50% instead of hovering at around 70% - 80% which was what I got with Beta 1 previously.

Watch the video.

Full screen mode doesn’t seem to be silky smooth though like in windowed mode, but is still very watchable. Overall I am seeing a drop from 70% - 80% to 40% - 50% in Beta 2. That’s a nice improvement, however I am not sure if I have followed steps correctly. I’m kind of expecting much lower CPU usages in future versions. Still, in the end, this is very usable as it is.

GMA 500 support may have been dropped or at least has taken a step backward. Trackmart has tried the new version on a GMA 500 device in IE and Google Chrome but unlike Beta 1, noticed more crashes and no hardware acceleration this time round. (see these comments)

Tested with:

• Acer Aspire Revo (single core Atom 230, NVidia ION graphics)
• Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta 2
• NVidia ION drivers 195.62 (dated 11/26/2009)
• Windows 7 early build (before RC)
• Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5.5 (worked same in both)

Prior results with version 10.1 pre-release.

Anyone else tested it out? What are your results?

Thanks to Ion for the constant driver updates!