Flash Related Question

[mali]

they'll be conveniently overlooking devices that aren't based on an ARMv7 core like a Snapdragon or OMAP3

 

[fischju2000]

No, that's just worded poorly. "We require a device with an ARM v7 (Cortex) processor." From the thread. They ARE supporting the OMAP3/Snapdragon phones.

 

[Vanil]

Just saw this on engadget.com

"Indeed, PC Magazine points out that Adobe's current verbiage is that Flash 10.1 is going to require Cortex A8 "or better." So much for the "open" in Open Screen Project, eh?"

on the front page right now.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just saw this on engadget.com

"Indeed, PC Magazine points out that Adobe's current verbiage is that Flash 10.1 is going to require Cortex A8 "or better." So much for the "open" in Open Screen Project, eh?"

on the front page right now.

That comes as no surprise whatsoever. Was anyone really gullible enough to think they would be supporting last-generation or older devices? Flash 10.1 is likely to need a fair bit of optimisation so it makes sense to optimise for "today and tomorrows technology" and none at all to spend money making it work on devices which hardcore users will be ditching soon or already have.

I'm not saying I agree with it, just that it comes as so surprise. In fact, I will be overjoyed when it shows up on the N900, as I do not even trust them to deliver it on there even though they already have it running on it in private testing.

 

[Elanzer]

Farmville would have terrible performance on the Pandora even if it had a native flash plugin.

An Athlon 64 3200+ 2ghz can't even run farmville worth a damn, I actually ended up building my mom a sempron 140 based system and overclocking it to 3.8ghz just so Farmville wouldn't run like utter crap.

I think Farmville is actually more CPU heavy than Crysis just because of how shit flash is

 

[Awakening]

I think Farmville is actually more CPU heavy than Crysis just because of how shit flash is

10.1 will be hardware accelerated B)

 

[Elanzer]

I think Farmville is actually more CPU heavy than Crysis just because of how shit flash is

10.1 will be hardware accelerated B)

That's just for video streams ala h264

Flash will stay just as horribly inefficient for everything else in 10.1

 

[Awakening]

That's just for video streams ala h264

Flash will stay just as horribly inefficient for everything else in 10.1

I just looked it up http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678. If AnandTech is correct it will only be H.264 and only on Windows. And if that's not enough it will only be on supported GPUs. According to the article however, nVidia says that Flash animation will become accelerated as well in a future version. How long that's gonna take is anybody's guess. I do wonder how likely it's going to be that Flash will run on the Pandora with HW acceleration. ION will apparently be able to handle it.

 

[fearofshorts]

I think that everyone should switch to Unity. NOW!

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

That's just for video streams ala h264

Flash will stay just as horribly inefficient for everything else in 10.1

I just looked it up http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678. If AnandTech is correct it will only be H.264 and only on Windows. And if that's not enough it will only be on supported GPUs. According to the article however, nVidia says that Flash animation will become accelerated as well in a future version. How long that's gonna take is anybody's guess. I do wonder how likely it's going to be that Flash will run on the Pandora with HW acceleration. ION will apparently be able to handle it.

This is insane, flash has always been and still is a vector animation package. Running it on the GPU would seem be a total no brainer that even Adobe could figure out.

Also, why on earth would it need to be optimised per-GPU? Surely they can use OpenGL for 99% of what the GPU would speed up, leaving perhaps 1% (video codecs) that might need to be more GPU specific. What on earth are Adobe doing? Do they even have any developers as they sure don't seem to actually be writing any code.

 

[OrR]

That still doesn't mean they own any rights at all to it. Also, the Palm Pre gets Flash 10.1 as well, as do a lot of other ARM devices. Maybe Palm or Nokia payed to get it a little early but they certainly did not buy exclusive rights to Flash from Adobe.

Unless I'm misunderstanding Wiz's point, he's saying the plugin is owned by Nokia, and that's the plugin that was being discussed about getting running on the Pandora. (which does not in anyway mean exclusive rights to Flash)
Now what their deal with Adobe is I don't know, could be a timed release, could be exclusive rights to that particular plugin, may be absolutely nothing, but either way the actual plugin that their running is bought and paid for by Nokia and therefore probably copyright protected.

I'm not saying Adobe doesn't have any other plugins etc that could work on Arm/Pandora, just saying that Nokia's plugin is there's, until we're told otherwise officially at least.

Nokia paying for gettin it early (or at all) doesn't mean that they own any copyrights to it. I have no idea but I think it's unlikely that Nokia had much to do with devlopment of the ARM plugin other than assisting. The copyright is very probably still with Adobe. That still means we can't simply copy it. But we'd probably have to ask Adobe, not Nokia.

 

[juniorm33]

Probably should have said license instead of copyright but anyway, let me know what Adobe says.

 

[budweiser]

Farmville would have terrible performance on the Pandora even if it had a native flash plugin.

An Athlon 64 3200+ 2ghz can't even run farmville worth a damn, I actually ended up building my mom a sempron 140 based system and overclocking it to 3.8ghz just so Farmville wouldn't run like utter crap.

I think Farmville is actually more CPU heavy than Crysis just because of how shit flash is

That's funny , my wife has a Dell 2.5 + 1ghz ram , running xp pro ..She has no problems playing farmville(2-3 hrs daily) for the last 6 months..

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Farmville would have terrible performance on the Pandora even if it had a native flash plugin.

An Athlon 64 3200+ 2ghz can't even run farmville worth a damn, I actually ended up building my mom a sempron 140 based system and overclocking it to 3.8ghz just so Farmville wouldn't run like utter crap.

I think Farmville is actually more CPU heavy than Crysis just because of how shit flash is

That's funny , my wife has a Dell 2.5 + 1ghz ram , running xp pro ..She has no problems playing farmville(2-3 hrs daily) for the last 6 months..

Thing is, that is exactly the problem with flash. It seems to perform really randomly, on a slow machine it might run better than on a fast one. For some reason, its super sensitive to what system it is running on.

As for Adobe, I am seriously confused. They have not developed GPU acceleration on Linux because there is no standard API, yet its going to feature on Android, Palm Pre, N900, etc, which also all have different methods of implementing GPU acceleration.

Even if they only supported VDPAU on Linux it would make a lot of people happy as surely I am not the only person who saw where things were going and deliberately put an 8600GTS in my Linux box, as it was clear they were going to get proper GPU video acceleration out there first. Even supporting XvMC and XvBA too (which pretty much covers everyone with a GPU capable of H264 assist) would seem a lot less effort than supporting Android, Palm, Maemo, Windows Mobile, etc. So why is it alright to do it there but not for PC?

Basically its all politic as usual. They see portable pocketable devices are the future so supporting those is a desperate attempt to keep flash relevant to people. If flash doesn't work in modern "full internet capable" phones, then sooner or later websites will drift away from flash in favour of more compatible ways to do the same thing. With HTML5 on the horizon this is dangerous, as apart from casual gaming the most I ever see flash used is for video playback and most of all, advertising. Nobody is going to miss adverts not working and video can be done other ways, so Adobe really need to convince us flash is required as at the end of the day, it probably isn't. If you don't use flash then instead "there is an app for that".

 

[Awakening]

Thing is, that is exactly the problem with flash. It seems to perform really randomly, on a slow machine it might run better than on a fast one. For some reason, its super sensitive to what system it is running on.

I would guess it is single threaded so a multicore CPU won't do you any good. IIRC it runs faster at a lower resolution, don't know if it's possible to alter the size of Farmville. And you can change the quality setting for Flash to speed it up.

 

[Alpha2]

Frankly I'd think any performance issues with FV and the like might be server side at Zynga more than it would be on a 2ghz machine. especially since it's one of the widest played social networking games going today It's not like it's pushing polygons or anything. Heck I have troubles now and then with Mafia Wars and that's just html.

 

[mindlord]

Don't forget that Adobe's support for 64bit is not as good as 32bit at this point. In Linux flash on 64bit arch is a sloppy crashy mess. It wouldn't suprise me to find out it has performance issues on Windows.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Don't forget that Adobe's support for 64bit is not as good as 32bit at this point. In Linux flash on 64bit arch is a sloppy crashy mess. It wouldn't suprise me to find out it has performance issues on Windows.

Sadly true, I keep Firefox 32bit installed for that very reason, and the fact the eBay addon is stupidly 32bit only.

Funny thing, I have Flash 10.1 Beta 3 installed on my Linux and Windows machines now. It seems to crash Firefox on Windows more than it does on Linux, although both are clearly far less stable than 10.0 was. I hope its a lot more stable by release time as Flash has a nasty history of not being.