AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Flash 10.1 on GM45 and ION Laptops
As Anand mentioned, I ran some tests on laptops as a sanity check. Besides the AMD numbers (ATI HD 3200 using a Gateway NV52 laptop), I also ran tests on an HP Mini 311 (NVIDIA ION LE) and a Gateway NV58 (Intel GMA 4500 MHD). My results with the ION LE laptop are similar to Anand's experience, except that I didn't have an external display so I used the native 1366x768 laptop LCD. The difference between Flash 10.0 and 10.1 is absolutely stunning on an ION-based netbook. I conducted all of the laptop testing with the videos running in fullscreen mode.
| HP Mini 311 (ION LE) Full Screen 1366x768 Performance |
||
| Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 | |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - Avg. CPU | 98% | 66% |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - FPS | 1.1 | 24.2 |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Avg. CPU | 92% | 66% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - FPS | 7.1 | 27.6 |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - Avg. CPU | 90% | 69% |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - FPS (Dropped) | 10.5 (1519) | 24.0 (0) |
Using Flash 10.0, the ION netbook is horrible for Flash video. Standard definition movies on YouTube are about as good as it gets, and there's still obvious frame dropping when running in fullscreen mode. HD movies range from dropping about one third of the frames to dropping well over half of the frames, and that's at 720p. With YouTube now starting to support 1080p videos, things only get worse. We averaged around three frames per second on a 30 FPS video. Hulu is even worse, with SD video managing just 7.1 FPS and a 720p video running a 1 FPS slideshow.
Upgrade to Flash 10.1 and pretty much all of the problems mentioned above are gone. Average CPU utilization drops by 20 to 35% and every video we tested worked without a hitch (provided we used the &fmt=22 workaround mentioned earlier). Hulu's 720p Legend of the Seeker (one of their few HD videos at present) ran at a buttery smooth 24 FPS. Needless to say, your typical netbook using an Intel GMA 950 isn't going to be able to do any of this stuff, regardless of which version of Flash you're running.
Moving on to the Gateway NV58 with GMA 4500MHD....
| Gateway NV58 (GMA 4500MHD) Full Screen 1366x768 Performance |
||
| Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 | |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - Avg. CPU | 76% | 56% |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - FPS | 25.3 | 24.5 |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Avg. CPU | 72% | 62% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - FPS | 33.5 | 10.2 |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - Avg. CPU | 52% | 41% |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - FPS (Dropped) | 26.2 (0) | 24.0 (0) |
Things were a bit more interesting on the NV58. First, we really didn't have any trouble watching any of the videos in full screen mode using Flash 10.0. CPU usage was rather high on the 2.1 GHz T6500 processor, but there were no noticeable frame drops. Both Hulu videos had CPU utilization at above 70%, with spikes hitting 95%. The YouTube 720p video we looked at didn't require nearly as much CPU power, and it didn't drop any frames. One oddity worth noting is that frame rates actually tended to be slightly higher than the video content, though it didn't cause any noticeable distortion.
Updating to Flash 10.1 was a mixed bag. The good news is that CPU utilization dropped by 11 points on the YouTube 720p video. The frame rate also locked in at 24 FPS, which is what you would expect since the source movie is 24 FPS. Our Hulu HD 720p movie dropped CPU usage by 20%, again with frame rates running at the expected 24 FPS (give or take). The anomaly was the Hulu SD video, where we saw CPU usage dropped 10% but frame rates went from a smooth 33 FPS down to 10 FPS. Unfortunately, looking around Hulu, the vast majority of their videos appear to have this problem on the GMA 4500MHD.
Considering the problems we had with ATI video playback and Flash 10.1, the problem appears to be either graphics drivers or incomplete support for non-NVIDIA hardware in Flash 10.1. We expect this is one of those areas Adobe will work on during the next couple of months prior to the official launch of Flash 10.1.
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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.