Enable GPU Composing on Flash Player 10 Content
By default, hardware accelerated composing is turned off in the current Flash Player 10 beta, and rightly so. You should only need to use GPU composing if your application really benefits from it.
If you want to enable this new feature in the new beta player, the only way to currently do this is via an attribute in your HTML/JS embed code. The attribute in question is not an addition, it is the familiar “wmode” parameter. The parameter traditionally defines how Flash content is “windowed” on a page with the current choices being “window“, “opaque” and “transparent“. With Flash Player 10, the number of choices gets bumped up to five with the addition of “direct” and “gpu“.
wmode=”direct”
“Direct” instructs the player to totally bypass the parent web browser for rendering. You might compare it to standalone players performance with the little more kick.
wmode=”gpu”
“GPU” is full hardware accelerated composing. But note, GPU mode is not a magic bullet for speeding up everything, in some scenarios it may in-fact course performance drains.
I downloaded Flash 10 Beta last night and gave the new wmodes a whirl this morning. The game I’m working on works mostly with Bitmaps (everything except the main character is bitmap). If I run it at 120 FPS it plays at 90FPS in Flash (Flash 9 player), at 90FPS with wmode=normal, 60FPS with wmode=transparent, but to my utter surprise it ran at 3FPS with wmode=gpu. I’m really intrigued as to what would make it faster then? Even stranger was the fact that wmode=direct made it even slower - about 50FPS.
I’ve got a dual core CPU, maybe that had some effect. Could it be that my video card is only AGP (X1600) and the bandwidth is limited. 3 FPS is pretty dam slow!
3fps? perhaps it’s turned off by default for a reason?
i doubt GPU acceleration will be of much benefit for 3D work until we start using supported 3D primitives that can take proper advantage of it…
I get the same issue with my PC at work, but that is because it doesn’t have one of the support GPUs in it, so it has no choice but to enforce software rendering (CPU), so the CPU is almost doing twice as much work as before.
At home where I have a very powerful GeForce series 9 SLi set-up I’m hoping the total opposite will be true, but have to wait another 4 hours before I can test
I’ve also read that the browser STILL makes a big difference.
Thats still one up on me, all of my swfs cause a browser crash
with gpu enabled which i think counts as 0fps.
i wonder what I’ve done that it doesn’t like…
Tried some other random swfs and they where fine so its something I’m using.