Next Flash Player to be 10 times more efficient

According to a recent blog post by Adobe's John Nack, the next version of Flash Player (10.2) will be up-to ten times more efficient than previous versions, hopefully making browsing YouTube a less stressing experience.

Flash Player 10.2 introduces several new features, including mouse cursor options for developers, full-screen playback support for multiple monitors, and IE9 rendering support. However, it's a new optimized video-playback technology that caught our eye: Called Stage Video, it'll shift the performance load from the CPU over to the GPU.

A demo video showcased the upcoming version of Flash Player on both a PC and Apple's new 11-inch MacBook Air. In the video, CPU usage on the MacBook Air (which doesn't even ship with Adobe Flash) spikes to around 125 per cent of CPU usage when playing a 1080p clip, but when Stage Video is enabled, the CPU load drops to an impressive average of around 10 per cent.

These are welcome and impressive changes, but in order to for the improvements to be seen for real, Websites will have to upgrade their video players to support Adobe's Stage Video technology. Thankfully, YouTube has implemented support for Stage Video, and it is expected that others, such as Vimeo, will follow.

If you want to check out Adobe's latest performance claims for yourself, you can download a beta of the new Flash Player now and head on over to YouTube to get testing.

[via Mac Rumors]

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Tags softwareapplicationsAdobe SystemsGraphics / multimedia

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