GPU Processing In Flash Player 10 Can Make Your Content Slower
I just finished reading an excellent article over at Kaourantin.net. Tinic wrote a brilliant article detailing what GPU processing in Flash Player 10 will mean to us. He obviously can explain it a lot better than I can as he is an engineer on the Flash Player team at Adobe.
Flash traditionally has had three modes in which it could be displayed in the web browser: transparent, opaque and normal. Flash Player 10 introduces two new modes, direct and gpu.
Once you read the article you will understand that Flash developers will have a lot more responsibility in their hands. Willy-nilly publishing in gpu mode could potentially result in an extremely bad user experience. Two of my favorite statements that Tinic makes are:
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.
and
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. It is usually best practice to limit yourself to one SWF per HTML page using these modes. The target should be content taking over most of the page and doing full frame changes like video. Never ever, ever enable this for banners. Plain Flex applications should not use these modes either if they are not doing full screen refreshes.
The whole banner thing worries me already. I remember what it was like trying to learn Flash back in the day… All we need are folks publishing everything in gpu mode and taking down browsers everywhere. Enough people, clueless as they may be, don’t like Flash because it “slows the internet down”, “crashes my browser”, “always says skip intro”, etc. And those things burn my biscuits - we all know good Flash doesn’t do any of those things.
So back to responsibility… Does the Flash community as a whole have what it takes to handle the new features and changes responsibly? What will this mean for deploying content? Currently (well, for the most part) you can publish once and odds are the large majority of users will have the same experience. As you read his article you will find that we are in for a bit of a change. Please don’t get me wrong - I think this is a good change, a needed one, one I will whole heartedly embrace.
Your two cents appreciated. In the meantime, check out Lee’s video on publishing content for Flash Player 10 right now!
May 17th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Well, the good thing is that you cannot simply publish your swf content in GPU mode, it’s up to the banner host script to decide if the loaded content will be GPU enabled or not. I doubt that Ad providers will be that dumb to clog their entire host ecosystem down just from curiosity.
As from independent developers - unfortunately there is too little information to prevent such thing from happening, most of them will put the GPU/DIRECT tags blindly.
This is the first place I got such important FP10 performance related information (Adobe, get a clue), thanks (Tinic too :)).
May 17th, 2008 at 10:16 am
thanx for news. i met that site - Kaourantin.net - thanx to you but i could not find RSS feeed link. is there ?
May 17th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Delizade, you can get the RSS here: http://kaourantin.net/rss.xml
May 18th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Unfortunately, I believe the answer to your question is no. While there are a large number of devs / designers in the “Flash community” who will understand the importance of using the new render modes appropriately, there are many who will not or simply don’t care. This is a microcosm for the fundamental problem that Adobe has with Flash. As more features are added to the runtime, more responsibility is given to the developer community. Because Flash is and has been so accessible, there is a very small barrier to entry, which increases the odds of irresponsible devs being part of the group. Other technologies don’t necessarily have this problem because getting involved in them is quite an undertaking, which, in most cases, precludes irresponsible devs from getting involved.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
don’t confuse irresponsible devs with newbies who are just getting into flash/programming in general. there really aren’t a lot of academic organizations (SFSU, PSU- my alma) that teach flash programming as it relates to programming overall. flash itself is more accessible than the info on how to write good oop code. flash mentorship is the only solution here, taking new/young programmers at the office under your wing and teaching them best practices and the like. when i was starting out, sure wish i had something like that…
i too, believe the answer to your question is a resounding, “no.” can’t give the benefit of the doubt to a large flash community that is nearly 100% responsible for the backlash it receives from those who complain about its detriment to the interweb from annoying sites/banners/cpu drain…
May 20th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
OMG - Leave it to the “Tweeners” to ruin adobe’s progress…….. I think I echo most of everyone’s fears when I say….all it takes is a few tweener sites with a million layers and endless timelines all using the GPU rendering to discredit flash over other techs. I wonder, does M$ poor attempt to compete w/adobe run into similar problems………wut’s that tech called…”crappylight”?
May 19th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
HI sorry dont really understand all this stuff im kinda new to all this just a quick question i was running flashplayer 9 with no probs untill it said i had to update to 10 now my web browser has slowed down i have to wait 15-20 secs for every new page to open can this be fixed or can i use something other then flashplayer hope you can help in some way
THANKS
Tony
May 20th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Tony, sounds like your machine might have other issues. Flash Player 10 shouldn’t be slowing your machine down like that. Are using Firefox as your browser?
May 20th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
yea i have the latest one