The Flash Art of War

Came across this post today from flashguru.com that talks about Flash Player 10. Aparently an early release of the Flash 10 Player is available from Adobe today. Here are some really cool features I wanted to highlight from Adobe’s Site.

Visual Performance Improvements
Flash Player 10 builds on the dramatic script execution performance improvements introduced in Flash Player 9 with the new ActionScript 3.0 Virtual Machine (AVM2) by enhancing the equally important visual performance of your RIAs and rich media experiences. Leveraging the power of the GPU for blitting and compositing reduces the load on the CPU and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences.

GPU Compositing — Combining images, filters, and video in your SWF just got faster. Your video card can be used to do compositing on all raster content. Utilizing the hardware processing power of the graphics card, GPU compositing accelerates compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software on the CPU. GPU compositing is applied when specified in the HTML parameters provided appropriate graphics hardware is available. If the hardware does not provide required capability, Flash Player will fall back to the software rendering without user interaction. Hardware compositing takes advantage of the tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU, reducing the load on the CPU, and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences. Open GL 2.0 video card with GLSL capabilities required to use this feature. When in use with the beta, a green square will appear in the upper left corner when accelerated.

GPU Blitting — Paint SWFs into the browser using your video card by choosing this new HTML parameter. Your content can run faster and give you the freedom to do more. Developers can enable or disable GPU surfacing to perform hardware blitting for each SWF within a web page without having to recompile the SWF. GPU surfacing extends the hardware-scaled fullscreen view introduced in Flash Player 9 Update 3 and applies it to the browser window so that the pixels drawn to the browser go through the GPU, resulting in improved performance and reduced CPU demand, rendering video- or image-intensive applications faster.

Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1) — An update to the Saffron anti-aliasing text engine increases performance and quality of anti-aliased text, particularly for Asian character rendering. Support for stroke fonts reduces memory requirements.

Vector Data Type — Flash Player 10 and ActionScript 3.0 add support for a new data type called Vector that is an ECMAScript 4 proposed language addition that is similar to an Array but requires that all elements be of the same type. By having a consistent type, performance on Vectors is significantly higher than Arrays. Vectors work as a parameterized type.

For a full list look here. This is going to open up a new word of visual programming in Flash. I am really looking forward to playing around with this stuff. Luckily what I am working on at Heavy requires lots of bitmap manipulation so its good to see Adobe is really taking this stuff to the next level. Adobe, when do we get to play?

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