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Maybe that's the reason the Zune HD doesn't have flash yet, they're waiting for GPU accelerated flash.

Maybe they don't have the GPU to accelerate it.

But its heart is the nVidia Tegra platform, so perhaps nVidia is going to push that flash player improvement over some way

Um... among media players, they're the only ones who do have the GPU for it.

Are you people serious? Why would MS use Adobe Flash in their Zune HD (other than support in a browser) when they have their own technology called Silverlight.

Well maybe because Silverlight is not used for everything. Winmo 6.5 has flash in it's browser, my guess is that Microsoft just needs permission from Adobe to have flash in the Zune HD.

Learn to read what the person you are replying to actually wrote. Did you miss the point where he said "other than support in a browser"? The Zune HD doesn't have a browser, so it has no reason to have Adobe Flash on it.

Yes it does.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/10/zune-hd...ught-on-camera/

If you read the original article, it states that Tegra is officially supported. Zune HD = Tegra.

Is IE Mobile really a browser? Well, technically the Tata Nano is a car but you see where this is going....

You can pull up web pages and view them with it, so yes, it's a browser.

So is lynx so i guess it is. Does not hold a candle to Safari on my iPhone though.

Browsers shouldn't be holding candles. That's what candle holders are for.

Which is relevant how?

agreed, about bloody time

yeah, agreed, even if they'd implemented the ability to detect if they could have video accelerated it, and if not, just use CPU.

Me too.

It most likely will require CUDA which the 6600GT does not have.

Yeah, my Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz is probably not enough for Flash content.

Touché. The CPU is not the problem here.

Yeah really. I've seen crappy old P4 with Hyper-Threading play flash content. I would imagine your Core 2 Duo should be just fine.

From what I've seen, no matter what processor you have, Flash will use all of it. Better processors will be less compromised than others, but not THAT much. Why not just face the fact that Flash is anti-optimized?

From what i have seen 720p on my core2duo uses around 20% CPU. What kind of CPU are you using and what else is running on the computer?

I've request that be updated. You're right, it's not upcoming. Call it poetic license gone wrong

Unfortunately it seems like only Nvidia has been able to produce any tangible results in terms of GPU acceleration through various things like CUDA and video decoding.

ATI seems to talk the talk but never seems to be able to show any results other than highly specific applications like folding.

No

yeah, that would make the most sense

Flash's Multi-threading introduced in V9 is horrid and got worse in V10.

It will max out a couple of CPUs and if the machine sadly has HT, it shoves processing to a HT virtual CPU and actually plays slower than if it didn't split the threads congesting the HT operations. (Which it even seems to override what the OS tries to shove to the HT CPU, ignoring the HT concept all together - Adobe's Flash developers are pretty stupid in this area, and i7 users and Atom users with HT are finally seeing the problems and screaming at Adobe, even though they still don't listen.)

Flash 'especially' with a multi-core HT system can even crash the system with CPU thread sync errors if you have any hint of CPU cooling or stability issues.

Setting up an overclocked i7, the best stability test you can run on it is a Flash player, as it will drop the system faster than high end burn in software.

The best solution, would be for the websites with HD Flash content to just use the custom codec feature of Silverlight 3 and shove the video to people using Silverlight player technology.

Playing the same video with the same encoding, Silverlight is significantly lighter and can easily play a 720p video on even a freaking Netbook.

And if people move to the WMV/VC1 codecs, it is even better looking without any loss in performance. (Watch Netflix, which uses Silverlight VC1 codecs on a Netbook, and even HD versions, and then try to watch a Flash standard definition video and notice it hiccup with dropped frames.)

In Silverlight testing, we could even get a 1080 VC1 stream to play at about 18fps on a freaking Netbook Atom 270.

Oh, and this is without turning on the GPU acceleration features of Silverlight that is already available and works on older and integrated GPUs.

Flash 10 on my Core2Duo with crap Intel graphics running 720p video uses around 20-22% of the CPU. Nvidia can bring CPU down to near zero with their GPU

Why replace one proprietary tech with another even more proprietary, patent encumbered tech? Oh yeah, this is a Microsoft forum....

With a Core2Duo I got about 13% CPU usage with a streaming Flash H.264 720p video that I tested just now. I'm not sure what some people were ranting about with this "100% CPU usage" FUD. It's true that Flash doesn't stream (not talking about CPU usage here or quality) as well as Silverlight currently, but that will be fixed with the next version of Flash. Also remember that you rarely see any H.264 Flash videos, legacy Flash codecs cannot be compared to VC1.

100% usage isn't FUD if the machine is HT enabled. Look at a P4 w/HT that is technically only a few points in performance behind many of the Core 2 Duos. Yet Flash will bring it to a crawl because of the poor threading.

Next take a new i7, that is beyond your Core2Duo, and you can find Flash again improperly threading on the HT portions of the i7 CPU, and bringing some of the CPU core's usage up to 100% on a CPU that is significantly faster than your Core2Duo.

It isn't about Flash 'always' being crap, but on some architectures and CPUs, it REALLY is crap.

(And especially in the Netbook market with Atom CPUs that use HT technology. And the best you can expect on a Netbook is Standard Definition Flash, that is quite blocking looking, and in conrast users can run VC1 with Silverlight or even in a Media Player and get a full 720p, which is a massive difference in quality and performance.)

Because Silverlight actually works better, has more features and isn't as patent encumbered as Flash.

Go check out the Moonlight project if you think Silverlight is a closed solution.

Additionally, Silverlight can use any CODEC so you can use an OSS codec, or the industry standard VC1(which is WMV) or whatever you want.

These are all options you don't get with Flash.

Because nobody gives a crap about whether the platform is proprietary or not. In all honestly, what the hell would you do with the source of any product like Flash or Silverlight? Fracture it into a billion competing versions of each? Yeah, that would be great. Nothing would please me more than to have fifty different versions of the same software on my PC just so I can see all the content of various websites. Pure brilliance, pc_tool

Since when was VC1 the "industry standard"?, pretty much everybody uses H.264 (including Flash)

I don't see this pushing Silverlight to do anything different, as Silverlight 3 already has GPU acceleration, that not only does video acceleration but vector and 3d processing based on the WPF technologies.

What kind of Mac do you have? I have a two year old Mac Book Pro running Leopard and Flash runs fine with very low CPU utilization

flash 10 has hardware acceleration for only video scaling.

the de-coding of the stream is still done by your CPU.

PS The hardware accelerated video scaling is also still pretty buggy, as it will lock full screen flash video players a lot when enabled, so many users have to turn it off.

+1

I think something is wrong with your PC because i'm really far from 50% cpu usage while watching youtube video.

No , nothing's wrong with my PC. It happens sometimes.

Maybe all the anti-virus and anti-malware and intrusion detection software you have to run with Windows is killing your performance? Or maybe all that indexing crap they have turned on by default?

All that indexing crap? Really? You have no idea what Windows does or how it does it at all do you?

Indexing in Vista and Win7 run at a low prority state and also use the NTFS technologies so that it only has to readdress documents files that changes instead of re-reading the entire drive to update the index as you will find happens on OS X.

This computer has over 1,000,000 indexed documents and emails, and is a P4 laptop from 2005, and there is no performance impact that can even be measured. And having full context searching on overa million documents is a very handy feature.

Vista malware 'Defender' is also built in, and again has no performance impact that any tester has been able to find even on low end hardware. (Microsoft Security Essentials goes full anti-virus and again can't be found to impact any performance on a low end system.)

Although I will agree with you that some products like Norton/Symantec and McAfee are horrible in reducing a system's performance, and why lighter technologies like Avast are better solutions. If you notice the OEM vendors that ship Norton and McAfee enabled on their systems have a higher rate of users hating their products and also as a side effect thinking Vista is slower than it truly is.

(Norton and McAfee don't use the OS level anti-virus/malware API sets and instead inject themselves into the kernel I/O processes which is a massive degredation of performance.)

PS
I don't recommend that anyone use 'real time' protection unless they have porn addict users that know nothing using their computer.

Anti-Virus software that does a nightly scan is more than sufficient for 99% of all users running Vista or Win7. Also a right click - scan this file is more than sufficient to protect a user that has a clue.

And my anti-virus recommendations apply to all OSes, Windows, OS X and even Linux. So have the Anti-Virus tool installed, but don't let it run all the time, and be smart about what you are running.

No doubt about that, and to top it off, most web designers overload their site so bad, it almost CAN'T run!!

Good thing for flashblock!!

(snipped)

I am running Flash 10, with crap Intel Integrated graphics, Core2Duo 3.06GHz, on XP and when I go to youtube and run the video of Micheal Moores interview at HQ setting, my cpu usage is around 7-8%

Last edited by GreyWolfSC on 30 Sep 2009 - 19:32

flash 10 has hardware acceleration for only video scaling.

the de-coding of the stream is still done by your CPU.

It's not low res stuff like youtube HD that this is aimed at, which is anything but, think it's a massive 480x360. So your 7-8% CPU load is irrelevant in relation to this tech as they're talking about 720p.

i will bite...went to http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/DEMO..._H264_500K.html for a 720p flash video and it moved my CPU up to a whopping 20-22%.

So a pretty high end notebook it's 20 odd percent, so what is it on an ION netbook?

Don't have one to test, but from the links posted with the story, it looks like it runs very well on the GPU with no effect on the CPU

Mine was fluctuating from 12-17%.

I tried it on a pre-Core CPU, a P4 3Ghz HT, and it went from about 5% before hitting play to an average of 90% afterwards. I've seen this on videos of far lower quality, too. So maybe things are OK in the Core2 world, but not the previous generation. Interestingly, I can play non-Web videos (movies, TV) in various players and not see this kind of CPU usage, so it points more to inefficiencies in Flash than the CPU.

If Michael Moore got thiner your CPU usage would be around 1-2%.

Again you are seeing the main crux of the Flash problems. HT enabled CPUs are hit hard, as the threading introduced in V9 of Flash is really stupid about flipping threads to the HT virtual CPU process.

So on a P4 with HT or an Atom Netbook with HT or EVEN a high end i7 quad core with HT will see unusually high CPU usage.

HT is a major technology, especially in the Netbook market and this is where Flash is getting a massive black eye, especially when users of i7 high end system also see performance problems/crash from Flash and its HT issues.

Like I said in another post, if you want to truly 'test' your i7 CPU that you are overclocking, run a few web pages with Flash content, it will drop the system with CPU errors and CPU core Sync issues faster than high end burn in software that shoves the system to 100% utiltization.

This is why Flash kind of sucks right now, as even in my house with several computers, four of them have HT based processors and Flash is horrible on them.

OTOH, perhaps in my case Flash has other problems, because I disabled HT in the BIOS but find that Flash is just as hungry as ever.