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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brundlefly - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I don't know why you are saying that everyone has an issue with Flash, including Windows users, because I have never had a problem with it under Windows - ??On MacOS - BIG problems with HD YouTube content.
I installed the 10.1 Flash Beta on my 2008 unibody 2.4GHz MacBook - both on Snow Leopard side and on the Windows 7 x64 Boot Camp partition.
Made no difference whatsoever on either side.
I used Firefox playback of the 1080P version of the Dark Knight trailer for comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v...">http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v...
Under Snow Leopard, the video was obviously jittery and video info indicated many dropped frames. CPU usage: 127% AVERAGE. Even the buffer froze at one point, stopping the video - I get this often under MacOS for some reason. The fan started up in seconds.
Under Windows 7, I experienced a handful of dropped packets on starting the video, but never observed anything but pitch-perfect playback, and the buffer raced far ahead of the playback time with no slowdown. CPU usage: 55% AVERAGE
Its the same damn hardware.
Drakino - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
It is an issue specific to the Mac, however the ball is in Adobe's court to fix it. It's their code that sucks ass under OS X. Apple had HD video content playable just fine full screen prior to the switchover to Intel CPUs.This is why Apple pushes for open standards and wants Flash to die. Apple can't improve the closed Flash platform on their own, but they can build their software to support standards well. It looks bad for the Mac when the platform has problems playing keyboard cat due to closed proprietary crap.
The fact that Adobe "magically" brought CPU usage down from 450% to 130% is clearly a sign they can improve it if they try. Now they just need to stop acting like children and use the OpenCL standard on OS X 10.6 to accelerate it via the GPU.
7Enigma - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
"This is why Apple pushes for open standards..."I'm sorry your post is negated by this hysterical comment.
Drakino - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
"I'm sorry your post is negated by this hysterical comment."How so?
Sure, Apple likes to control their platforms, but that doesn't mean the platform is built on closed technology.
WebKit (the foundation of Safari, tons of mobile browsers including the ones on Android and the Pre) started as KHTML. Apple helped extend it and turn it in the mobile browsing powerhouse. It's also one of the most HTML compliant browsing cores out there. If HTML5 ever sorts out this video codec mess, it is possible it can replace Flash, a technology only controlled by Adobe.
Quicktime is completely MPEG 4 compatible, due to the fact that most of MPEG 4 is based on Quicktime technology. H.264 is everywhere now, streaming into the crappy Flash players, being used to encode movies on BluRay, and so on. MPEG 4 audio is also widespread mostly due to the iTunes Store.
PDF is a core part of OS X.
Bonjour/DNS-SD is an open protocol widely adopted by many printers and other devices, and even Microsoft with Link-local Multicast Name Resolution borrowed heavily from it.
OpenCL is a unified GPU compute language that helps to get GPGPU acceleration out of the "Glide/3dfx" realm and on it's way to a wider adoption.
Grand Central Dispatch is a great technology for developing programs that run well on multicore CPUs, and is being adopted by FreeBSD as well.
Would you like to bring up any counterpoints, or just mindlessly try to bash comments without anything to back them up?
mindless1 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I will mindlessly bash. Ha!Apple is closed, all you did is list how they perverted something open to make it closed, extra effort in doing so.
menting - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
if you rephrase it this way it'll be more correct."Apple pushes for open standards on anything they don't/can't control/own"
Souka - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
My wife's old ThinkPad T30 laptop, with its ATI 7500 Radeon isn't supported. Guess she can't watch her latest shows in full screen..heh.iwodo - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
I need 70% of CPU Core to watch Full HD Video on a bleeding edge Computer?I dont know if it is poor programming or what. But i expect more with OpenCL support, and faster software, as well as near Zero CPU resources for H.264 content.
Why do I have extra 40% CPU usage watching H.264 content inside Flash, when i have sub 10% CPU usage when watching it through OS Media Player....
Xplorer4x4 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Will this be of use on a GT 130M?Stereodude - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
The acceleration does work for at least some people on the Intel 4500MHD chipset. You need the absolute latest drivers from Intel (.1986) that came out only a few days ago though.