AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease

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.

NVIDIA's drivers are publicly available however:

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

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.