Updated Windows 8 Flash lacks hardware acceleration

By Denis W.
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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If you've noticed Flash video being a bit choppier than usual, it might be because of the recent patch - the one from last week:

http://www.neowin.ne...g-one-for-ie-10

Prior to this patch, on my laptop with Optimus the dedicated GPU would turn on whenever I played a video. You could enable or disable hardware accleration in the settings panel.

With the updated Flash build, the option is no longer there and as a result videos are offloaded onto the GPU (read: choppy).

Just seeing if others notice something similar. You can uninstall last week's update by going into "View Installed Updates."

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Kool Box

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From what I can see using Process Explorer to look at my GPU usage when flash player is running in IE10, it does seem to use my GPU to accelerate the video but maybe it's not doing it as well as the previous build. Anyway, hopefully in the near future when general release arrives they will update to Adobe's recent builds.

Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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From what I can see using Process Explorer to look at my GPU usage when flash player is running in IE10, it does seem to use my GPU to accelerate the video but maybe it's not doing it as well as the previous build. Anyway, hopefully in the near future when general release arrives they will update to Adobe's recent builds.

The 11.4.x builds as shipped in Chrome have the hardware acceleration panel ticked. Though unfortunately Chrome isn't as snappy as it used to be.

  • 2 weeks later...
Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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After the recent IE Flash update and the recent Nvidia driver update, I checked to see if the hardware acceleration tab was there in the updated version of Flash was there, and it wasn't. But after updating the Nvidia drivers, it disappeared for the older (vulnerable) Flash as well.

Either way, I checked via GPU-Z to see if the GPU was in use while watching Youtube videos (i.e. the live VP debate) and it does report GPU activity in the video engine. So it's okay on my desktop. Unfortunately this isn't the case for my laptop with Optimus - all the activity remains on the (crap) Intel graphics chip and not on the Nvidia GPU.

If only we were offered the option to update Flash at our own will instead of depending on the bundled plugins in IE and Chrome. For my laptop, I tried the regular plugin version of Flash in Chrome (and disabled the Pepper version) and the Nvidia GPU does turn on in Flash videos.

  • 3 months later...
Grand Master

PNWDweller

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I've noticed that streaming music from another Flash based site (Pandora, Grooveshark.etc...), if I happen to load another page in a new tab on a different site that happenes to use Flash, it gets super choppy, lags, stops until new site is finished loading. Never noticed that until I went to Windows 8, so figured it was a bug there.

Will have to look into seeing if this fixes things. (BTW, using Firefox).

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