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DirectX and OpenGL Hardware Acceleration in Flash9 Update?

Tinic Uro who works on the Flash machine recenty posted some great news to hopefully a new direction, possible hardware acceleration with the next Flash update! This is mainly for 2d drawing acceleration but Tinic also notes in his first point that this update improves the speed of Papervision3D (currently a fake 2d painters algorithm 3d).  Adobe is listening to the market on this one.

And what is this, OpenGL and DirectX hardware scaling? It helps to draw the full screen version faster since its more taxing on the processor probably but this will lead to further use of OpenGL and DirectX for 3d, I hope.

Full-screen mode with hardware scaling. Probably the biggest new feature in the Flash Player Update 3. This leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX. There is an new API to control the behavior which was required since we could not change current behavior and we wanted to give the maximum flexibility possible. I know you are probably eager to use this feature, we will post more information on this on labs.adobe.com soon. I’ll also will give you much more technical details in an upcoming blog post.

Found via Zeh. I have dreams of hardware acceleration in flash and what it will do to the gaming world. Microsoft has Silverlight which they could easily make DirectX capable and might as well at such low penetration rates right now, but they would stop at switching to OpenGL I think for cross platform support.  Adobe might be willing to risk it and since they already own Director, roll in OpenGL engine support into Flash and win the 3d web battle not to mention just entirely take 2d effects and animation to a new level as well.

UPDATE: Here is Tinic showing the 1080 video with nhardware acceleration in the new update. Anyone with >2 screens at work, they get stuff done.

http://video.onflex.org/2007/06/14/tinic-uro-shows-new-fullscreen-hd-video-in-flash-player/

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 11:04 pm and is filed under 3d, ACTIONSCRIPT, ADOBE, AS3, DIRECTX, FLASH, FLEX, GAMEDEV, GAMES, NEWS, OPENGL, PAPERVISION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • when will flash support drm?
  • Here is Tinic showing the 1080 video with nhardware acceleration in the new update.

    http://video.onflex.org/2007/06/14/tinic-uro-sh...
  • Yes but it is a start of using subsystems of OpenGL and DirectX. it definitely will be the best video for full screen and it might help the performance of the current 2d/fake 3d kits like papervision that are kust killing. But you are right, it is not as big as I personally was hoping for. It might happen, maybe, some day...

    Maybe they can take the schokwave 3d support and work it into Flash at some point as an add-in or something but it looks like the only massively distrubuted 3d OpenGL/DirectX capable control is still Director which seems to have been abandonded for a nice chunk of 3-4 years.
  • Zeh
    So it turns out it's really cool for video playback (yay hd!) and some 3d/complex rendering by upscaling a viewport (yay hardware interpolation!) but that's about it; we're not seeing DOOM 3 in Flash this time as this has nothing to do with 3d.

    Still good though.
  • The Flash team has really been listening to the market then because hardware rendering, multicore support and many bugs have been fixed.

    Multi-threaded vector renderer. Now we take advantage of up to 4 Cores/CPUs for vector rendering.


    Multi-threaded bitmap filters. Same as above but this applies to bitmap functionality specifically instead of the core vector rasterizer only.


    Multi-threaded video decoding. The VP6 video codec will now run in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected which leaves the main thread to do rendering and post processing of the video. With this true 1080p video is now possible on most modern dual core machines. Also, the responsiveness is improved with this change. The Sorenson codec on the other hand did not get this change for technical reasons.
  • milo
    Nearly nothing i'm working on is for the web.
    Everything on large screen resolutions up to
    1920 x 1200 including *.flv. Mostly its for fair
    presentations and exhibitions. Hardware rendering
    support for the graphic output is one of my two
    main wishes. second is "dual core" support.
    so have the power of a full machine and not only half.
  • Yeh its solely for scaling in full screen it seems at the moment and for 2d rendering benefits but this is good news. Flash 3d engines are actually 2d engines faking 3d and it won't have 3d support but opening the door to using OpenGL and DirectX might hint to a future 3d direction. Using DirectX or OpenGL right now for 2d makes everything faster and pushes what you can do further in 2d flash.
  • Brett Walker
    I don't think this is going to have anything to do with 3D engines. Likely, it will be just what it says. It will provide hardware acceleration for Flash bitmap scaling. Mac OS X (and Vista I believe) uses OpenGL and DirectX respectively to offload the rendering of the windowing system to the 3D capabilities of video cards. I'm interested to see the performance gains. Tangentially, even this should provide some benefits to Flash-based 3D engines.
  • I hear you I tend to get overly excited and let down but this would be killer if full screen things run better, excellent for gaming market. But then this goes into the question of a tiered presentation again, where some users will have the best and latest OpenGL and DirectX and others won't . One good thing is DirectX has shipped with Windows for some time, so at least DirectX7-8ish support is pretty mainstream.
  • Zeh
    I had the same question when I saw that. "WTF? What does OpenGL and DirectX 'scaling' even MEAN?".

    This could be big and this could be mediocre. The wait is excruciating.
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