Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Update: Looks like someone doesn’t want us watching that video. It has been made private. Also Hexus says that they NVidia will be announcing something on October 5th.
Back at CES 2009, Adobe announced that they would be teaming up with NVidia to work on improving performance of flash video. Now, there is finally a video up showing an NVidia ION powered netbook smoothly running full screen 720P flash videos. Another good reason for picking an ION powered netbook!
What does this mean for the next generation of Intel netbooks that will (most likely) have the GMA 500 graphics integrated? These netbooks will probably have to rely on an upcoming Broadcom card with Flash playback suppport.
Source: NotebookJournal.
Thanks Ion!
Will this apply to the n10j too? I sure hope so (unified architecture and all that)...
If Adobe releases a new FlashPlayer with GPU Hardware Accerleration support, it will be the same experience on a GMA500 based device.
I just downloaded the trailer shown and threw that file into Windows Media Player 12 (which supports H.264 acceleration), super smooth Playback in 720p on my Acer 751 (GMA500).
Since Adobes Flash Player is multi-platform, this update will relate to all Intel/AMD/nVidia GPU“s with H.264 hardware acceleration.
I rather doubt whatever this is, is going to be multi-platform.
Most likely Nvidia paid a whole bunch of cash to Adobe and got the dedicated video logic block on their GPU’s access to the video stream in the Flash framework (remember flash is not just video). It probably wont do anything either to alleviate performance for (non-video) Flash content on a website.
They’ll probably spin it as CUDA only technology, if so Nvidia will have exclusive support meaning no other non-Nvidia GPU’s will work.
This isn’t uncommon for instance under linux Nvidia uses its own API to provide access to the video decoding engine, I’d guess they have written their own special one for Adobe and the Flash plugin too.
A far better long term solution would be
A) Adobe re-write flash framework for better performance
B) Everyone switch to a better technology e.g Silverlight video streaming blows Flash out of the water in performance.
Of course neither of those two are likely to happen so we have these band-aids like Cuda.