future of GPU in flash, thoughts [DISC]

Anyone remember this article
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/wh...tion-mean.html

I was having some re-think about graphics acceleration in flash,
and about what will be able to do in the near future.

For an example if adobe gets along better with gpu,
we would be able to make both a cpu(browser) and a gpu(fullscreen) version
for those users with graphic cards and have a nice tv.

We all know more and more computers have graphic cards,
half of the people I know has at least a "Nvidia8500".

Anyone has his own experience with the gpu mode in flash?
I haven't really tried it out.

just to be clear, every retail pc has a gpu, so a graphics processing unit, no matter whether that sits on a seperate graphics card or is on the mainboard.
A long while ago pcs came with 2D graphics cards or graphics chips and one had to buy a 3d card seperately. 3D cards quickly became so demanded and dominant though that quickly manufacturers stopped producing 2D only cards and shifted their production to cards/ gpus which handle everything.
In most areas of the world pcs sold in the last 5+++ years come with a pretty 3D capable card/ gpu.
Now the difference there is in the details, which opengl/ direct x version is supported and other such details.
The thing is flash wouldn´t have to and shouldn´t support the latest highend features of direct x 10.
It should scale nicely and make use of older card´s minimum specs.
The thing is for many years flash hasn´t made use of the graphic card´s graphic calculation powers at all, it let even all graphical things be calculated on the cpu. This is the main reason why flash requires a very fast cpu for most things and even then usually runs at bad performance compared to things done with other technologies.
A while back it looked as if Adobe finally woke up and they touted that now they have fancy gpu mode and all will be fancy smancy.
So far no propper noticable results are there though, so as flash enthusiast its about hoping it was a first step towards something propper (making use of the gpu for all graphical operations) and not just another empty marketing bubble.
As always there´s the next flash player version to hope for.

good point you got there, let's hope the next flash player
or an improved flash player 10, handle GPU properly.

To make those fullscreen gpu processed games I'm looking forward to,
flash uses vectors for almost everything it will be insta-HD for us,
in the same browser.

PS.- Flash Cs4 is so damn buggy.

There are "rumors" that they are full force working on propper gpu acceleration, but as often with such things its hard to tell how much of it is true beforehand, so yeah, let´s see.
For a while i was in the believer camp, then in the still trying to be optimistic camp, then in the pissed of desillusioned camp and now i´m in the no hype believer but always happy about being positively surprised camp who takes it relaxed and works on other stuff meanwhile until one can see what is real=)

It sure would rock a lot if flash had propper hardware acceleration for all graphical operations, many confuse that with "why do you want 3d card support, flash needs no 3d!" but yeah, its that´s not the point.
The point is all 2D graphical things could be rendered faster and the vector graphics example you brought up is a very good one. Wouldn´t it be nice if one could actually use vector graphics and it would run at wicked performance? =)
There are actually ways and tools to allow that for flash content, sadly not with the browser plugin right now, neither for usual flash standalones without special tools.

And yes, CS4 is horrible, dunno what they were thinking there.
Well, i imagine what they were thinking: Let´s do the ide in a way we can quickly port it to have quick n dirty cross platform availability.
And now its this clunky buggy mess.
Also for several versions they have this identity crysis with the flash ide, they want to sell flex (now flash builder) and lots of other tools and thanks to wanting to sell those not evolving functionality of those further propperly in the flash ide (for example the coding panel). Then with AS3 using movieclips not only turned into a nono in theory but also way less practical to pull off thanks to such things like not being able to access and control nested movieclips before they throw an event. In general the whole setup in AS3 speaks a lot for doing way more codeside since its a lot more cumbersome to control timeline stuff, even multiple swfs based stuff.
And since the main use of the flash ide was setting up timeline stuff and movieclip stuff,hm..


I once wrote Adobe a very long mail about what i think should all be done to the flash ide to make it useful again, dunno if they even read it =( =)

Your right it also freezes a lot and I can't draw properly,
in fact I still draw in flash 8 because I can't stand pressing Ctrl+G and not being able to draw anything till I double click outside and move around a little,

The coding gets random lagging every now and then.
The only good thing they have new is the
Slow 3D component, it's as slow as hell
when runned in a browser by a normal computer.

The bones are not usefull at all only if you're a fan for tween animation because this guys don't deform vectors(which I was expecting).

1 step forward 2 steps back.

yeah.
Best you write em a mail with feedback and suggestions using their feedback system and if you have a blog or something like that write a post about it there, too.
Adobe seems to listen most if enough people moan loud enough about something.

"Adobe seems to listen most if enough people moan loud enough about something"
lol, all big companies are like that at least macromedia cared about their product,
this is obvious lack of polish and optimization probably ran out of time trying to get it all in the adobe package,

what I don't understand is why they haven't patched this up yet.

Bring back Macromedia.

I've given up on the GPU fight, I doubt it will ever happen, unless they loose 50% of their player penetration to some other technology.

Imo, Adobe don't really need to do diddly squat to stay ahead right now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mr_malee

Bring back Macromedia.

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You know, some former Macromedia guys work at the unity 3d guys now ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mr_malee

I've given up on the GPU fight, I doubt it will ever happen, unless they loose 50% of their player penetration to some other technology.
Imo, Adobe don't really need to do diddly squat to stay ahead right now

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Yeah, that´s a point i wondered a lot about for a while, too.
I actually think they are already massively loosing ground though.
Not to a single thing alone but several things together.

I see more and more developer mates switching over to unity3D or iPhone, xna or some other stuff to play around with and for the in browser stuff its impressive what html 5 and the canvas stuff allows there so adobe will sure loose a lot of ground on that end with time, too and has to make up with something, at the same time MS is still sorta pushing silverlight and while that is still weak in comparison there´s a lot of force on MS side of course.

I also think they can´t ride that "the new flash player is 500% faster now with gajillions of wicked performance and graphic dazzling features!!!" hype wave endlessly,
i mean at some point even the last hardcore believer will loose faith.
(I consider myself having been a pretty hardcore macromedia/adobe believer and supporter for ages for example and i lost faith in them a good while ago, sure there are still some who haven´t done so yet, but for how long if adobe doesn´t get its act together?).

Its always tough if not totally impossible to predict such tech evolution future but i have the feeling adobe guys are at least feeling some pressure from several sides there, if not they should better open their eyes :)

I was checking out the hardware acceleration tools and they don't exist in fact the user decides to use it or not in the settings box
http://www.insane-angel.com/images/ha.jpg

I decided to check in a fully vectorial game that runs at 60FPS in fullscreen Leap a Loop
http://www.insane-angel.com/images/ha2.jpg
since the game is entirely made out of vectors it gave the
game some acceleration but the fact that it wasn't what I expected pissed me off,
I can run Dead Space in high with my nvidia card, this sucks!

PS.- the % is a lie

Yeah, sure it sucks compared to many other things.
Adobe always has this hype thing going where they come out and tout a performance improvement and then its not at all or just very barely noticable at all with actual content as discussed before.
The only noticable performance raise with flash players i saw in the many years past there was when doing things in AS3 instead of AS2 and then that´s usually mostly only for code execution, the graphical side is still super slow.
Even the code execution is of course still super slow, too when one thinks about the point one codes close to Java or C# syntax there meanwhile and other technologies run lots faster when one codes in Javascript syntax, but yeah, anyway..

Me, i still come here in between to check out what´s going on these days and some part in me still hopes that some day, at the end, they get it together, but regarding actually working on things i still do flash things for clients but for anything that needs performance and/or should run nicely on other devices i´ve for quite a while opted for using other things than flash.

For me the turning point was one of the flash 8.5 or 9 public beta players which had a propper noticable performance raise compared to older players.
Still nowhere near what i´d love to see with less laziness on adobe side, but yeah, at least really noticable.
Afterwards it turned out they just bumped up the cpu and ram ressources allocation heavily and that´s where it got its performance raise from.
Some rumored they did that to back up another false hype claim, others said they were just testing things and that was a common thing to do.
In either case they took that out without further mention in the release player then and it had already gotten its two weeks of blog hyping of people being excited about the oh so great new player version until people noticed: wait, there´s something wrong with this.
That was the final case that made me decide: Ok, Adobe guys, no matter what you tell me or show me, i won´t believe any of it until i can try the release version on several machines for a few weeks :)

I remember the day when I first learned that Adobe bought Macromedia:
Adobe acrobat reader popped into my mind, endless crashing explorer windows trying to open a pdf files, dozens of versions to download and screaming hard disks trying to load a program that, from my point of view, should be no larger than 2 Mb.

I felt betrayed, sad and worried.

Now, 4 years later, I am still worried and every time something does not work with flash, I wonder if the bug comes from my scripts or from Flash.

"every time something does not work with flash, I wonder if the bug comes from my scripts or from Flash"

Same here, and I believe most of us have the same issue.

to zanzarino: at first i wasn´t sure what to think about adobe taking over macromedia but i had hopes there could be as many positive sides as negative ones :)
So far the main positive side i see is a bit better cross app integration regarding opening one app´s file in another. Besides that, yeah, its sorta not been that great and i imagine many former macromedia guys who got fired after cs4 hasn´t sold that great think the same.

Regarding your thoughts that when something does not work in flash you wonder whether it comes from your scripts or from flash´s side, at first i thought: hm, ok, it has those annoying sides, but its not THAT bad, is it?
Then i thought about the joys of relearning the "language" every few versions, seeing what works and doesn´t work anymore now and also especially fun stuff they introduce with the security sandbox and similar things every few flash player updates, so yeah, i think you´re right :( :)

I don't know tom,
I rather learn when I have free time not when I only have an hour left to deliver a project,
and if you could turn the constant mistake system on and off you would never turn it on.

Still I'm possitive about it, only when it doesn't have my boss writting in all Caps,
WHICH IS MORE MENACING THAN HOW IT SOUNDS. see.

haha,yeah :)
Its funny with the compiler´s error detection and what it tracks as error. Some think the current form helps em become a better programmer and avoid more bugs, others preferred it that it wouldn´t moan about some things as bugs in first place by automatically trying to try to get to the right solution.
I personally could live with both ways as long as both allow to do the same things. Like i hate it that one can´t access and control nested movieclips anymore before they throw an event, i feel like such things are a big step back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Never_land:(

"every time something does not work with flash, I wonder if the bug comes from my scripts or from Flash"

Same here, and I believe most of us have the same issue.

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For now im thinking that thats one more reason to use copyPixels instead of movieClips, havent found anything wrong with those guys untill now

I did several games in bitmapdata only approach and while they can be used better than movieclips for some things in AS3 (mostly because flash performs better when dealing with bitmaps and sprites than movieclips and one can´t nicely control nested movieclips in as3 anyway),
they come with their own share of downsides.
Like huge memory usage when you do some things (as bitmapdata is generally uncompressed image data),
no nice way to edit them visually unless you create your own sorta flash ide editor just with bitmapdata editing and the one that was most painful to me even if not many may experience it:
Security sandbox troubles, cause Adobe did that great thing a while back of blocking all sorts of image loading, drawing etc when main swf and sub content swfs and images aren´t on the same server.
Not everyone does that stuff regularly but to me it was quite crazy to notice that regarding loading and drawing media from other sources flash is thanks to Adobe meanwhile more restricted and limited than some first gen html browsers.

One basically has to work around each security sandbox stupidness with another workaround, on asset loading side at least for several issues policy files and proxies can help, but really, needing such stuff to load images?

Anyway..

Well, the way i did is importing, not loading externally, and before that editing with photoshop many times untill i found it good enough to begin to use it, and for memory using the same BitmapData for many bitmaps
Off course, editing bitmaps in photoshop is not as easy as changing vector graphics in flash, like you cant drag lines and stuff, but bitmaps are faster and looks better, so i think thats the price

hello everyone, through some searching I have found a way to enable GPU in flash :) *that elusive green square. Sorry if this has been posted before, but here's how to enable GPU rendering.

this document explains it: http://www.adobe.com/support/documen...ease_Notes.pdf (page 65)

you'll need CS4

navigate to this directory: "C:\Documents and Settings\username"

there should be a "mm.cfg" file in there, if not, just create one.

add these lines to the mm.cfg file:

DisplayGPUBlend=1
OverrideGPUValidation=1

create a flash movie, go into publish settings, go down to "Hardware acceleration", select "Level2 - GPU"

Test your movie, run the movie outside of the FlashIDE in the flash10 debug player.

you should see a green square in the top-left corner, if its any other colour, GPU cannot be enabled.

Adobe do not recommend you do this as it could crash your computer http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15384v1063

let me know if you have any success :) my card is pretty crappy here, would love to see how many sprites a good card could handle. When testing on my computer the example runs at 40fps in GPU and 11 in normal with 6000 bitmaps moving around :)

I cannot get this working in a html file, I believe adobe has stopped this from happening since it needs the mm.cfg file to work

I see green square. However, it runs within debug player at ~45 fps no matter if gpu is enabled or not. It runs at 60 fps in non-debug player.

hmm, guess you don't need the debug player then. Their doc must be wrong?

so how did it run without GPU enabled tony?

EDIT - It seems the mm.cfg might not be needed, guess its only used to show if GPU can be used. Simply toggling the publish setting will alter the performance. Also, it seems the gpu likes bigger images. running the above with 8000 2px bitmaps will run quite slow on the GPU, using normal mode will render it faster. However, rendering 8000 sprites of the pig in normal mode will render much slower than in GPU.

Malee can you test it with 3D rendering? I'd imagine that's where the most obvious increase should be if it actually works.

I strongly recommend you and others here join the CS5 beta program so that there are voices there from the game development side of things.

https://prerelease.adobe.com/

They are pretty far from a release (CS4 was only patched a month or two ago, for the first time!).

Your voice WILL be heard there and you can help shape the next release.


As for GPU... I think most of that implementation was strictly in favor of video streaming (ie: blitting a rectangle of graphics real quick). That's why you see little to no improvement in anything else, such as interactive and dynamic elements.

They don't have a solid grasp on using the GPU. Photoshop CS4 won't even do GPU accelleration unless you have a very modern card. Odd considering PS is mainly just 2D and 2D accelleration hardware hasnt really changed since the mid to late 90's.

And the place to sign up for the pre-release program is here I believe:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform...lease_interest

That video was pretty interesting Malee. I have never watched videos on their site before.

Yes,its a good idea to take part in a beta to see what they are doing or not doing and get heard, just as you should also post your views in your blog or other blogs on the topic (see here: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=800427 )
Regarding the "GPU acceleration" as it exists in the flash player right now is a bad joke.
As Ray pointed out its main use is for video playback right now and even for that it isn´t all that useful as it only works in certain cases on certain (very few) graphics cards.
I hope with the louder getting of contender tech and complaints by the community now Adobe will be forced to act propperly (or, well, more and more will switch over to other things with time and it will be Adobe´s own fault).