Flash 11 coming soon with GPU-assisted 3D graphics engine

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Adobe's Flash Player is about to receive its largest update since the introduction of hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding in 2009. Version 11 of the software is set to go live early next month and will reportedly introduce a GPU-assisted rendering API called Stage 3D. Adobe claims this addition will boost Flash's ability to render 2D and 3D games by one thousand times, enabling "console-quality games."

The company explains that Stage 3D can display millions of objects on screen while maintaining a smooth 60 frames per second. This was demonstrated in a few clips that show gameplay in "Tanki Online" and "Zombie Tycoon" (we've included the former below). Even dated budget machines with integrated graphics and Windows XP can expect a 2-10x boost over Flash Player 10 when rendering software.

Adobe estimates that some 70% of Web games are powered by Flash, including 9 out of the top 10 games on Facebook and 70% of the titles on Google+. That supposedly amounts to an audience that's over 11 times larger than Nintendo's Wii, and nearly half the Web upgrades Flash Player within four weeks of a new release. Naturally, the company feels like it's paving a fresh avenue for developers to pursue.

"Flash Player 11 and Air 3 allow game publishers to instantly deliver engaging games to anyone with a PC, tablet, smartphone, or connected TV," wrote Adobe's Tom Nguyen. "And with Stage 3D, game publishers and developers can take their games to a new level, creating new opportunities for game developers and publishers to deliver and monetize their content." You can find more details and videos here.

Alongside that announcement, Adobe said it's preparing an emergency patch for Flash. The update should drop tomorrow and will address a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2011-2444) that is being actively exploited in the wild by tricking users into clicking on a malicious link via email. Attackers can potentially gain control of compromised machines. Chrome users should have already received the fix automatically.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/45573-flash-11-coming-soon-with-gpu-assisted-3d-graphics-engine.html

 

[Timonius]

Nice! I really hope Flash 11 can deliver because it is tiresome to hear Adobe falling behind all the time. They've got a lot riding on this.

 

[Jibberish18]

Timonius said:
Nice! I really hope Flash 11 can deliver because it is tiresome to hear Adobe falling behind all the time. They've got a lot riding on this.

It makes you wonder why they've fallen behind for all these years? I'd say it's a classic case of "Male Lion". What I mean is, when you're the king of the jungle, you do whatever you want and that includes sitting back lazily why other predators might be creeping up on your domain. This is what I think happened here. HTML5 is coming up fast and strong with huge players like Microsoft and Google and NOW all of the sudden Flash is claiming 10-1000x performance? Where the hell have you been for all of these years?

 

[fpsgamerJR62]

We already have the benefits of GPU acceleration in our browsers so it's about time that Flash Player tapped into the power of both discrete and integrated graphics. I guess we'll find out next month if Adobe can live up to their claims of up to a thousand fold increase in performance.

 

[Det]

Jibberish18 said:
It makes you wonder why they've fallen behind for all these years? I'd say it's a classic case of "Male Lion". What I mean is, when you're the king of the jungle, you do whatever you want and that includes sitting back lazily why other predators might be creeping up on your domain. This is what I think happened here. HTML5 is coming up fast and strong with huge players like Microsoft and Google and NOW all of the sudden Flash is claiming 10-1000x performance? Where the hell have you been for all of these years?

That was a really weird post, but they never claimed 10-1000x better performance. Only 2-10x (and that was on some friggin' 10 years old XP).

And obviously the open source HTML5 Canvas can develop much faster than the closed source Adobe Flash, whether they were "sitting back lazily" or not. And I really don't think they have been... or did you just miss every Flash release in the last years?

Have a look on the history of just Flash 10 since 2009 December: http://www.filehippo.com/download_flashplayer_ie/history/

 

[Guest]

@Det
Read the first paragraph: "Adobe claims this addition will boost Flash's ability to render 2D and 3D games by one thousand times, enabling "console-quality games.""

one thousand = 1000

 

[Jibberish18]

Det said:

Jibberish18 said:
It makes you wonder why they've fallen behind for all these years? I'd say it's a classic case of "Male Lion". What I mean is, when you're the king of the jungle, you do whatever you want and that includes sitting back lazily why other predators might be creeping up on your domain. This is what I think happened here. HTML5 is coming up fast and strong with huge players like Microsoft and Google and NOW all of the sudden Flash is claiming 10-1000x performance? Where the hell have you been for all of these years?

That was a really weird post, but they never claimed 10-1000x better performance. Only 2-10x (and that was on some friggin' 10 years old XP).

And obviously the open source HTML5 Canvas can develop much faster than the closed source Adobe Flash, whether they were "sitting back lazily" or not. And I really don't think they have been... or did you just miss every Flash release in the last years?

Have a look on the history of just Flash 10 since 2009 December: http://www.filehippo.com/download_flashplayer_ie/history/

First off they DID claim 1000 X (As one of the Guest's has already said). Second off, what do the number of Flash releases matter? Show me all of the major changes these Flash release have made and THEN I'll give you AND them credit. Why don't YOU look at the history and check out, for example, some of the security issues they've had and how long it took them to patch them. From what I remember, in terms of performance, Version 10 of Flash Player was the first version that really mentioned good performance boosts. Like I said, to me it seems like Adobe has been...let's call it "lax" when it comes to their most popular product. And this is a huge company we're talking about.

 

[Guest]

Rock on chrome!!!