AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ATI and Intel Update, 11/19/2009:
After uninstalling Flash 10.1, reinstalling, rebooting, and switching to the High Performance power profile (instead of Balanced), some of the Hulu problems noted on the previous page seemed to clear up slightly. We already tested with the latest Intel drivers, so that wasn't the issue. Additional testing revealed that if you disable GPU acceleration with 10.1 (and restart your browser), the Hulu 480p problems are not present, but we continue to have difficulties with Hulu 480p playback on the GMA 4500MHD with GPU acceleration enabled on all the videos we've tested. The 360p videos work without any problems. Here are the updated results, including results from the Gateway NV52 HD 3200 laptop using the Catalyst 9.11 drivers. We've also added the data for 10.1 with GPU acceleration disabled as a point of reference.
Intel GMA 4500MHD (Gateway NV58)
| Updated Gateway NV58 (GMA 4500MHD) Full Screen 1366x768 Performance |
|||
| Flash 10.0 | Flash 10.1 (GPU) |
Flash 10.1 (No GPU) |
|
| Hulu 720p - CPU | 61% | 37% | 69% |
| Hulu 720p - FPS | 26.3 | 24.7 | 25.3 |
| Hulu 480p - CPU | 58% | 56% | 68% |
| Hulu 480p - FPS | 35.9 | 10.9 | 33.9 |
| YouTube 720p - CPU | 32% | 24% | 37% |
| YouTube 720p - FPS (Dropped) | 26.5 (0) | 24.0 (0) | 19.5 (104) |
Starting with Intel, the results have only changed slightly. We can now use Flash 10.1 in all cases, but we have to disable GPU acceleration for certain videos. This may be an issue similar to NVIDIA stating that ION has problems with YouTube HD videos that are 854 pixels wide; hopefully it will be cleared up with driver and/or Flash updates. HD Flash on the other hand definitely benefits from the GPU acceleration and DXVA in Flash 10.1. The Hulu HD Legend of the Seeker video has CPU usage drop 24% while the 720p Prince of Persia trailer on YouTube reduces CPU usage by 8%. Hulu's The Office does reduce CPU usage 2%, but frame rates drop from 30+ FPS to only 10 FPS.
Turning off GPU acceleration in Flash 10.1 shows where and how much the 4500MHD is helping. The YouTube HD trailer drops to around 20 FPS with occasional dropped frames causing noticeable stuttering, and CPU usage jumps 13%. Hulu HD playback remains smooth, but CPU usage jumps 32%, so the DXVA acceleration clearly helps a lot in this instance. Standard Hulu videos like The Office return to a smooth frame rate, but CPU usage is 10% higher than Flash 10.0. Overall, since the Intel GMA 4500MHD with a T6500 CPU manages to handle Flash video up to 720p in full screen mode using Flash 10.0, the 10.1 update isn't critical right now. If you're using a CULV processor (or a display with a higher resolution), Flash 10.1 may be more beneficial. We'll look at that scenario in a future article.
ATI HD 3200 (Gateway NV52)
| Gateway NV52 (ATI HD 3200) Full Screen 1366x768 Performance |
|||
| Flash 10.0 | Flash 10.1 (GPU) |
Flash 10.1 (No GPU) |
|
| Hulu 720p - CPU | 76% | 56% | 76% |
| Hulu 720p - FPS | 13.2 | 24.5 | 24.5 |
| Hulu 480p - CPU | 72% | 62% | 73% |
| Hulu 480p - FPS | 12.7 | 34.9 | 31.3 |
| YouTube 720p - CPU | 53% | 22% | 42% |
| YouTube 720p - FPS (Dropped) | 26.0 (0) | 24.0 (0) | 21.3 (103) |
With the updated Catalyst 9.11 drivers, our results were a lot better than before. Previously, using Flash 10.0 we were unable to view either of the Hulu videos (720p or 480p) in full screen mode without severe stuttering. YouTube HD on the other hand worked fine with 0 dropped frames. Moving to Flash 10.1 with DXVA GPU acceleration, we now see smooth frame rates on all Hulu content and lower CPU usage for both Hulu and YouTube videos. YouTube CPU usage on the Prince of Persia trailer drops 31%, Hulu's Legend of the Seeker drops CPU use 20% while nearly doubling the frame rate (i.e. from dropping half the frames to showing everything), and 480p Hulu drops CPU usage 10% with frame rates almost tripling (from ~13 FPS to over 30 FPS for what appears to be 30 FPS video content).
Disabling the GPU acceleration in Flash 10.1 still results in a better experience at Hulu than Flash 10.0, with roughly the same CPU load but no stuttering. YouTube HD is similar to the GMA 4500MHD in this case, with a frame rate of 21 FPS and slight stuttering. Unlike the Intel platform, if you have an ATI card and a moderate CPU it appears that Flash 10.1 is a clear win.
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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.