AnandTech Tests GPU Accelerated Flash 10.1 Prerelease
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Flash/Hulu on ION: Nearly Perfect
I dusted off ASRock’s ION system based on the Intel Atom 330 (dual-core 1.6GHz Atom) processor for the first part of today’s testing. It had a copy of Windows Vista x64 installed so I stuck with that. The integrated GeForce 9300/9400M chipset supports DXVA/DXVA2 and should be able to offload much of the video decode from the sluggish CPU to the integrated GPU.
As you can see from the results below, CPU utilization drops significantly when going from Flash 10.0.32.18 to 10.1.51.45. Not only do the numbers drop, but playback performance (number of dropped frames) improves significantly. I’d say that all of the tests below were totally playable on the Ion system thanks to Flash 10.1.
| Windowed Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder | 70% | 30% |
| Hulu HD 720p - Legend of the Seeker Ep1 | 75% | 52% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder | 40% | 23% |
| Hulu 360p - The Office - Murder | 20% | 16% |
| YouTube HD 720p - Prince of Persia Trailer | 60% | 12% |
| YouTube - Prince of Persia Trailer | 14% | 7% |
These are awesome improvements. The Hulu HD results were a bit high but the YouTube HD test showed a drop from 60% CPU utilization down to 12%. Most impressive. Now on to the full screen Hulu tests:
| Full Screen 1920 x 1200 Average CPU Utilization | Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 |
| Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder | 70% | 55% |
| Hulu HD 720p - Legend of the Seeker Ep1 | 83% | 68% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder | 70% | 70% |
| Hulu 360p - The Office - Murder | 70% | 70% |
The biggest difference I saw was running Hulu Desktop in full screen mode (1920 x 1200). While CPU usage wasn’t at 100%, the latest episode of The Office was completely unwatchable in the previous version of Flash. Updating to 10.1 not only dropped CPU utilization, but it made full screen Hulu Desktop watchable on a ~1080p display with the Ion system. I can’t believe it took this long to happen, but it finally did.
The one anomaly I encountered was CPU utilization not dropping while watching Hulu in a maximized IE8 window. I’ve brought it up with NVIDIA and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on.
There is some additional funniness that happens with certain NVIDIA GPUs and some flash video content. Some YouTube videos use a 854 pixel-wide resolution, and default to software decoding on NVIDIA ION and GeForce 8400GS (G98) GPUs. To fix this problem you have to do one of two things. Under IE8 NVIDIA recommends that you do the following:
With Internet Explorer, you may not be able to enter GPU-accelerated playback mode on many clips that naturally start in 854x mode. As a workaround, append “&fmt=22” to the end of 720p clip URLs and &fmt=37 to the end of 1080p clip URLs. The videos will then play in GPU- accelerated HD mode.
Firefox 3.5.5 users have to follow a separate set of instructions:
Before running a YouTube HD clip, please go to Firefox menus and select Tools/Clear Recent History. Ensure the Cookies checkbox is checked, and do the clear. Next, go to Tools/Options/Privacy and select “Never Remember History”.
The above procedure will ensure an HD clip is first loaded in SD mode with 640x horizontal resolution, and then you select the HD button and get GPU- accelerated playback at 1280x HD mode. If you do not first delete Cookies and then turn off history, you may enter an 854x SD horizontal resolution upon starting up an HD clip which is not GPU-accelerated today. If starting in 854x SD mode, when you switch to the HD version, it will still be non-GPU accelerated.
These limitations are only on ION and GeForce 8400GS based GPUs, the rest of NVIDIA supported GPUs accelerate all content regardless of resolution. NVIDIA expects this behavior to be fixed either by updated NVIDIA drivers or an updated version of Flash.
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rnj - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
it is not gamma settings definitely, i noticed this as well.ahar - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
I tried 10.1 on my system which has a Pentium E6500 and 9500GT and the latest Nvidia drivers. The CPU utilisation went way down whilst watching a HD stream on the BBC iPlayer but the image quality had also dropped considerably. There were noticeable block artefacts - it looks like the AA which was previously applied was no longer happening. I had a quick play around with the PureVideo settings it the Nvidia control panel but nothing seemed to make a difference.I've reverted back to Flash 10 now.
magicalz - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
AMD/ATIHardware video decoding of H.264 content in Flash Player 10.1 is supported on AMD/ATI products with
UVD2 with the ATI Catalyst? Software Suite, starting with version 9.11 for the ATI Radeon? family of
products, and driver release 8.68 for the ATI FirePro? family of products.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Well, that would explain things, though I *swear* it said Catalyst 9.10 earlier today/tonight. I think Adobe fixed a typo, because I even followed a link at one point to download the Mobile 9.10 drivers.Scali - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
You can download the 9.11 RC from AMD, as it is also required for the 2.0 beta4 release of the Stream SDK (with OpenCL support).Perhaps you could try and see if it makes a difference? I'd like to see that, especially since I have ordered a Radeon 5770 a few days ago.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
The 9.11 RC you mention through AMD's developer site does not support Flash 10.1 GPU acceleration, I just confirmed. Waiting for a driver that does from AMD, also trying to see when AMD will make it public.Take care,
Anand
Scali - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
Yes, it seems that AMD released the 9.11 drivers at about the same time as I made that comment.The final 9.11 release should have the GPU acceleration for Flash... However, it didn't seem like they left the OpenCL support in the final release.
So the 9.11 RC drivers and the 9.11 final release seem to be very different :)
hechacker1 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
1. So I'm assuming flash now takes advantage of DXVA2 EVR rendering, so the GPU is now responsible for decoding quality? I should now be able to adjust my AVIVO settings for flash? I'm not too sure how EVR/dxva and the video card is related.2. Too bad linux isn't yet supported. Flash on linux is notoriously bad. Nvidia is pushing their accelerated VDPAU, and many software players now include support for it. ATI and intel though are doing something different, but it seems binding are available to translate. So hopefully in the near future linux gets a modern bitstream accelerated video acceleartion framework.
3. Does it work with H.264 only? Or does it also work with sorenson and vp6 codecs? So youtube HQ or better is mp4 always?
hechacker1 - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
And thanks for the article!blyndy - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
HTML5 is the real long-term solution, not flash 10.1.