AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Testing with AMD GPUs: Doesn't Work Yet
Update 4: AMD has released Catalyst 9.11 with Flash support for Radeon HD 5000 series and 4000 series GPUs. No word on integrated graphics platforms. We've begun testing but the drivers don't seem to enable H.264 decode acceleration under Hulu at this point, waiting for a response from AMD.
Update 3: AMD tells us that Flash 10.1 support is coming later today, we should have a working driver soon.
Update 2: The latest beta drivers from ATI do not enable Flash 10.1 hardware acceleration support (both leaked and the supposed Catalyst 9.11 drivers from ATI's developer site). We're still waiting for ATI to get us a version of their drivers that does enable GPU acceleration under Flash 10.1. Desktop http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_195.55.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_32bit_195.55.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_64bit_195.55.html Notebook http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winxp_195.55.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_195.55.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_x64_195.55.html
NVIDIA's drivers are publicly available however:
Update: The Release Notes now indicate Catalyst 9.11 drivers are required, which would explain our difficulties in testing. We're still waiting on a version of Catalyst 9.11 from AMD that works with Flash 10.1. We will post updated data as soon as we have the driver.
I’d say that my ION testing went pretty smoothly, but the same definitely doesn’t hold true for AMD.
I setup an AMD 785G system (integrated Radeon HD 3200) with a AMD Sempron LE-1150. This is a 2.0GHz, single core, K8 based processor with a 512KB L2 cache. Definitely faster than an Atom.
The integrated graphics of the 785G chipset fully supports H.264 decode acceleration and shouldn’t have a problem with Flash 10.1. AMD has it on the supported list and things should be smooth. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t agree:
| Windowed Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder | 97% | 100% |
| Hulu HD 720p - Legend of the Seeker Ep1 | 94% | 100% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder | 57% | 60% |
| Hulu 360p - The Office - Murder | 27% | 35% |
| YouTube HD 720p - Prince of Persia Trailer | 90% | 100% |
| YouTube - Prince of Persia Trailer | 8% | 8% |
Not only did CPU utilization figures not go down, in many cases they went up. I asked Jarred to help me with a sanity check. He had a notebook based on the mobile version of the same chipset with an Athlon 64 X2 QL-64 (dual core 2.0GHz) and ran his own numbers:
| Windowed Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| YouTube HD 720p - Prince of Persia Trailer | 46% | 46.5% |
There was no change in CPU utilization when moving from Flash 10.0 to 10.1.
The two of us did notice something however. Flash 10.1, although not perfect on AMD hardware, did seem to improve performance. Jarred measured the number of dropped frames between Flash 10.0 and 10.1 in our YouTube HD test:
| Windowed # of Frames Dropped (lower is better) | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| YouTube HD 720p - Prince of Persia Trailer | 289 frames | 212 frames |
There’s a definite improvement in 10.1, but just not nearly as much as we saw from NVIDIA.
I tried a few more things before giving up on AMD. I tossed in a Radeon HD 5850 to see if it was the integrated GPU at fault - still no change in CPU utilization. Finally I upgraded processors and used an Athlon II X2 240 instead of the meager Sempron.
| Full Screen (1920 x 1200) Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder (Sempron LE-1150) | 100% | 100% |
| Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder (Athlon II X2 240) | 80% | 72% |
CPU utilization finally went down, but not nearly as much as what we saw with NVIDIA. There’s something not quite right about how AMD’s hardware interacts with the Flash 10.1 preview; I guess that’s why they’re calling it a prerelease.
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imaheadcase - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I've never had any issues with Flash playing on computer, i got a normal computer to, GTX 260, quad core 2.83ghz, 8 gigs of ram.What video specifically do you experience "dropped frames" on?
ProDigit - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
try playing even the simplest farmville, grow about 1000 trees in it,and you have yourself one slow framedropping flash program!Voldenuit - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I know exactly what you mean about preaching to the choir. I have a decent midrange system (E7600, 8 GB RAM, 4870 1 GB, W7 x64), and even having Flash ads in an open browser window will choke my framerate on Dragon Age: Origins.So I did the sensible thing and installed Flashblock (previously I only used it on my laptop for battery life and performance).
Bad Adobe, Bad.
nilepez - Monday, November 23, 2009 - link
Better than flashblock, just use noscript (assuming you use firefox/mozilla).If I ran a website, I think I'd avoid all flash ads (or at least highly recommend my advertisers avoid it).
Although i know many block all ads, I have no problem with ads, so long as they don't talk and don't eat up CPU cycles....oh and I block the keyword ads, because I move my mouse while reading, and those inevitably block the text that I'm reading.
Someone said that the problem is poor coding and that may be true, but if you're on a message board and you open up a bunch of threads in different tabs, those flash ads will eventually kill your processor. On one board, I open up every single thread that I've participated in as soon as I get on (so that they don't get marked as read before I read them) and until I blocked flash, that killed my system.
heffeque - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Not also that. The 10.1 works even more unstable than the 10.0. I've tried it and I had to go back to 10.0 to be able to use firefox for more than 15 minutes.B3an - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
You people dont get it...1) Flash Player 10.1 is a early pre-release, NOT final.
2) Flash is great, it's the best thing out there for delivering so many things. It's also some of the most fun and creative software i use. The problem is how advertisers use Flash, and what stupid websmasters decide to do with it (dump flash ads all over the place. This is NOT the fault of Flash. It simply happens to be the best thing for these things. If there was anything that could compete, that would be used instead and then people would just call that annoying.
2) Nothing is wrong with Flash performance considering what it does. It uses Vector based graphics normally and this happens to be very demanding for CPU's, Adobe could not possible get vector graphics magically running as good as pixel based graphics no matter what they did. The advantage of vector based graphics though is things like infinite zoom with no pixelation, and adaptive resolution. It's nice to see GPU acceleration for video though, that was needed.
It's sad that even Anand does not seem to understand this stuff.
omaudio - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I agree Flash is a good thing and used poorly often. My concern is that the vector benefits you mention simply become irrelevant with pixel based video being converted to Flash. It is a mammoth waste of electricity and cpu/gpu cycles. I hope they are able to come up with a better alternative for video as it seems to me the core of Flash based video (vector based video) will never change.Griswold - Saturday, November 21, 2009 - link
No, its not an early previews. You can bet your momma that the final version coming early next year will still have at least half of the issues you can see with this beta.cosmotic - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Vector based graphics have very variable CPU requirements, where raster video has CPU requirements directly proportional to the compression and resolution which at this point is very high. The Flash player is extremely efficient. It has no problem reaching 60FPS on high resolution content. The problem comes when you overload the content with silly effects that Adobe made just a little too easy to use (eg: shadows). Your frame rate dispute likely stems from the default FPS of 24, which ironically is what film and video runs at, unless it's running at 29.97 or 30 FPS... either way much lower than 60.HD video just cannot play back without dropping frames without the help of a GPU. Most codecs use the GPU at this point so you rarely see high CPU usage with video playback.
I agree with you that it would be sad if Anand did not understand this stuff, but I think he understands it more than you think he does, and more than you actually do yourself. What's even more sad is how many people at Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, nVidia, AMD, etc don't understand this stuff. It's a nightmare for us even competent users, let alone computer illiterate.
What I'm sad that Anand doesn't understand (or maybe ignores) is how bad the entire codec and GPU acceleration industry is. I see screenshots of Absolutely horrid control panels and video players without comments like "Look at this complete trash they shipped us". There is no reason to have 1) non-native looking anything and 2) a control panel for graphics or codecs. This kind of bleeds over into the sound card realm as well.
Anand: I have a fairly similar Mac and I fully identify with you. The situation is complete garbage.
Zoomer - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I disagree, there is a point for control panels for video/audio codecs. See FFdshow.Control Panel for Gfx:
How else can we force things like AA, AA type, CF, etc on/off? Editing the registry?
Audio: Should we edit the registry to change the number of speakers, the subwoofer cutoff frequency (depends on size of mains vs. sub), etc?
"HD video just cannot play back without dropping frames without the help of a GPU. Most codecs use the GPU at this point so you rarely see high CPU usage with video playback."
Not really true, a good C2Q should do it just fine.
That said, I must say that flash wasn't really meant to be used the way it is used today.