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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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.