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Another problem is that the system requirements are really "uneven". A 1 ghz processor is pretty low end (no problem there). But most systems with that speed sold with only 512mb of RAM. Even as recent as last year (and maybe still now) low-end laptops were around 1.6 ghz, with only 512 mb of RAM.
I just took the system requirements from "Windows Vista with Aero Glass" page since Tinic Uro said FP will have same requirements. This could be not exactly what he meant or what final release of FP requires.
i´m not that worried that quickly many site banner ad companies would switch over to using gpu accelerated mode,usually they try to reach a broad mass and that is not one with the latest flash player version or rather new graphic card hardware.
Its a bit of a different story for tech heavy sites and full on adver sites, as one can see they already go for papervision content a lot now although that alone already without gpu support means the end user has to have a rather new box to have the content run really nice.
What is really ugly to me is that Tinic says a DirectX 9 class card will be required as Tony pointed out before,too.
I strongly hope they implement a propper solution soon which supports older gen cards,too, cause going for requiring the user to have such a recent card and yet not having propper access to pretty much any features of that card is a bad joke.
I´ve always been begging and preaching for gpu support but there i was hoping Macromedia/Adobe would implement it in propper way where one can benefit with it even with an earlier gen gpu.
and to those who say they´re not that worried cause they don´t expect Adobe to release a player as release version which has major issues: you should check recent player releases, especially security related ones where adobe several times made changes which reduced backwards compatibility on lots of content. Now one could say that is a different story because its about closing security issues but it shows that there was a change in policy regarding ensuring backwards compatibility and propper playback of content there.
Also in some cases those changes for closing "security loopholes" were implemented in rather questionable way on closer look.
Just as small example in older (2007) flash player versions one could easily use bitmapdata draw to draw a frame of a video into a bitmapdata. This was deemed as one of the unsecure things with one of the more recent player updates (as one could use it to grab images from a video one doesn´t own) so how they closed it was you can only draw it into an image if you use flash media server to play the video and pass a special flag there in the configuration file.
Hm..yes,let´s increase media server sales by not offering a propper solution where every flash developer without that can use the feature,too.
Yes, slightly offtopic, but yes, as it is right now the "gpu support" is again at best at marketing hype state, very few cards supported, even those obviously not detected well yet and then if one has the new embed modes on and gpu support is not enabled because the card isn´t supported then in many cases the content just randomly crashes or fully freezes the browser.
Its hard to believe they would ship something like that or even just something half as bad as release player, then again its hard to believe too they do gpu support at all in a way in which one only gets minimum render support only useful for specific content setup and only with very few rather new cards. And yet they just did it with a beta player. This is really crazy to me.
also if adobe doesn´t change the point that only directx 9 grade cards are supported this will instantly result in other plugins like unity and director having a much bigger really reachable audience than flash player in gpu mode, another interesting and crazy sidenote to think about.
I disagree about the entry level requirements of a DX9 compatable card being too high.
Every new machine in the past year or so has had Vista installed on it, which means a card which may not be full dx10, but at least dx9 to support Aero. So adobe are aligning the specs needed for gpu support with current machines.
DX9 was released in 2002, so I think it's fair to guess every card since 2004 will be dx9.
I'd rather have Flash supporting something that's only one generation behind rather than supporting systems that are dead or dying.
Also even apps like Unity need a new-ish card to be able to cope with shadows etc. it's not like you get all the great features it has with a dx7 card.
The step up to gpu support is pretty huge, and it seems like it's been shot down in flames even though adobe have said it's going to be a rocky road to get there. They've put their hands up and said there will be problems at this stage, it seems a bit moot to criticise them for something they've admitted to.
Squize.
mate, sorry, but you´re off in many points there.
yup,most cards released since directx9 was introduced have support for it but that does not mean at all that every pc sold since then has a card like that.
Next up i´d be fine if flash actually made full use/allowed developers to make full use of directx9 grade cards and then required direct9 grade cards.
The reality is however flash won´t allow even just access to a small subset of directx9 grade cards´features so it also makes no sense at all that that is required to have gpu support.
Flash will only use gpu for partial rendering assistance, if they did that propperly they could use way older gpus for this. There have been test flash players build by a single person or small team 4 and more years back which had gpu support for flash content rendering and they ran great with way older cards. The only downside of them was due to the teamsize and lack of direct access to the player codebase those custom players mostly didn´t have full AS support or only support for older flash versions.
You´d expect Adobe to be able to do better than a team of 1-5 people.
Next up you´re off regarding the unity comparison,too, it actually only underlines where adobe is off so much in how it does things now.
Yes, with unity you need a rather new card if you want to use features only that rather new card supports.
BUT unity can scale down, so if you only use features that older cards have then you´re fine with an older card.
And this is how 3D should be done and is done for ages in the commercial 3D industry, content and technolgy has to be scalable to support as many configurations as possible. I can hardly believe that Adobe,after all those years where flash didn´t get gpu support with the reason to attract the broadest possible audience now adds it in a way they only support the smallest possible audience.
Well, i shouldn´t wonder after they added multicore support before adding gpu rendering support using 8 year old cards.
And maybe you see my criticism as harsh but i see your kindness regarding how Adobe does things as way too gentle. Its one thing to say sure it will take time till they get it all right and another thing to accept they start it with only supporting a small subset of rather new cards.
The logical step would be they implement the rendering in a way that older cards can do it, not that one needs a newer card and still can´t use any of its features.
When should people complain if not now while its still in beta and things could be improved before final release? I think its important that its made clear the way they do it is off so they change it.
I think DX9 is a guideline. DirectX is only used in windows. Everything else is openGL.
It's great that they're giving each of the three platforms equal attention. That's something they need to do to keep ahead of silverlight.
By the time people the bugs get ironed out and people start producing a lot of commercial content that uses these features, we'll be on player version 11, and it'll be 2010, so the minimum spec isn't a big issue.
I'm more worried about instability and misuse.
Tabbed browsing in firefox already crashes because of one badly built swf (interestingly, this is more often a memory issue than a CPU issue)
I dont know that much about DX9 which my computer claims to have installed but I am pretty sure my card has no Pixel Shader 2.0 and absolutely sure it has not 128 MB RAM.
"yup,most cards released since directx9 was introduced have support for it but that does not mean at all that every pc sold since then has a card like that."
Nope, but the majority has. There has to be a cut off point, and I'd personally rather it dx9 than dx7/8.
A dx9 compatable card is under £25 ( $50 ), they're far from cutting edge, they're the bare minimum now.
Yes, not everyone has one, but in saying that people still use IE5, but anyone getting a new machine any time in the future will have a card that supports that min. spec.
It's not a stupidly high spec is what I'm trying to say. And for say the office based players who are stuck with a lame and nasty motherboard based gpu solution, they'll have a mare of a time just upgrading Flash anyway via IT depts.
"There have been test flash players build by a single person or small team 4 and more years back which had gpu support for flash content rendering and they ran great with way older cards."
Yep, but weren't they built from the ground up ? They were never complete ports and were only on Windows ( From memory ). The adobe team have to keep compatability ( Security issues aside ) and build it to work on 3 different os'es and a million different hardware setups.
To me it's like making a fancy wow engine, and making a complete game, there's a world of difference.
"And maybe you see my criticism as harsh but i see your kindness regarding how Adobe does things as way too gentle."
I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt. If when the gold version of F10 comes out and there are glaring problems then I'll complain about it like everyone else, like I did with the F9 beta issues.
I just can't see the point of bashing them now when they're moving in the what I believe is the right direction albiet slowly and not very well, but upgrades like this are baby steps.
And to be frank, this is me done on my views of F10 for the time being :) There's not much more I can say, and it's like the whole as2 vs as3 thing, no one's going to change their minds, at least with the current version. At the end of the day Flash is just a tool to get a job done, and there's only so much I can say about an unfinished version. From my point of view F10 will allow me to make better games than F9, and so long as the workflow isn't broken in some way, that's all I really care about.
Squize.
While I don't have the research available to go over any of these points and say I agree or disagree, I do believe now is the time to voice opinions to Adobe.
If we all wait till the final F10 release, Adobe will have no chance to act on anyone's opinions, valid or not.
I first started using Flash due to it's cross-browser and machine independent nature. It was the only animation prog other than GIF that was available way back in my WebTV days, and I've stayed with it due to it's penetration with a single API. Now it looks like, at least in certain cases, I will have to develop with two targets. I do not like the idea of using a single SWF file that will run at greatly different speeds depending upon the end user's machine. Looks like for the first time I will have to use some sort of sniffer to determine what Flash content to deliver, and I personally don't like that.
yeah,i totally agree, that´s why i´m complaining here and elsewhere so much, up till release version there´s still a chance something gets improved.Quote:
Originally Posted by JerryScript
to Squize: obivously we have heavily different views on the topic, so yeah, i agree, not worth discussing the same points over and over again.
the post's question really is the right one. it will definitely be an option, which is what kind of puzzles me about some of these responses.
i'm excited about the opportunity to do some stuff that simply wouldn't be possible, but with complete understanding that i'll sacrifice ubiquity insomuch.
well,on the quetion of the post i wouldn´t use the gpu modes if not either
-older gen cards are supported
or
-if only newer gen cards are supported one can actually use em more than for a bit of laughable rendering support only useful in very specific cases.
I imagine unless its about a client who has no idea about the hardware requirements involved it would be a tough sell to have to argue why such a new gen card is required and then it still acts and looks like flash content regarding what one can display/render.
And even when its about a game i make on my own on free will,not for a client i´d rather pick either a project where i don´t need gpu assistance or if i do one where i need support of such a high end card then i´d not use flash but choose something else where i can actually make use of what cards of that class have to offer.
But why wouldn't you take advantage of it?
So the client isn't supported, flash can fallback and play the content normally.
I just really can't see any disadvantage here. Even if I have a project that runs fine normally, why wouldn't I enable the gpu modes if it gives a speed boost? For anyone that doesn't meet the requirements flash can just continue on normally.
well,i wouldn´t "take advantage" of it because as it is right now there is not much of an advantage there.
first of all several swfs i tried crashed the browser when i opened em in a page using one of the new gpu embed modes. even if they fix that then you still can´t use any of the gpu features, its only used for small part of rendering related work.
In what kind of games would this be useful? Either your game is so display performance intensive that it needs gpu rendering support (in case adobe actually gets a propper performance increase going there) or its a game that is tailored to run fine without gpu rendering help.
so what´s the sense of turning gpu support on for a game you optimized to run fine without it?
eithr your game is something that requires a directx9 grade card or its one that doesn´t require one. If it is one that requires it it should better make the users and potential clients/portal hosts see though that you´ve got kickass stuff going on there that is worthy of a card of that gen. So yeah,all in all Adobe´s implementation makes no sense at all to me and therefore it also makes no sense to use it as it is.
Either they address those issues or its essentially marketing crap that will only lead to more issues on more sites using flash.
ok, so tinic just made a post where he writes and explains why pixel bender stuff won´t have gpu support in flash player 10 either.
see here: http://www.kaourantin.net/
for those not knowing pixel bender was formerly called the aif toolkit and with it you can do custom filters, blendmodes etc in an own language called hydra.
One can then use the things one made in various adobe tools/technologies,like also the flash player.
Well,everyone was hyped because in the demo version of the aif toolkit app filters one made where nicely displayed gpu accelerated,so ran really well.
And seeing with the gpu hype for the new player people of course expected the pixel bender filters to be gpu accelerated,too.
well,not gonna happen with flash player 10 now.
its funny or sadening really with flash, its always "yeah,next player version it will be better" just that this time that´s already the case before the current "new" player gets released as final version,because already in beta phase its clear how much of the talk was hype and how much is real then.
No more fps drops because you have some function taking several seconds to calculate paths, finding collisions or stepping through the bitmap pixel by pixel?Quote:
Pixel Bender kernel runs in completely separate thread from your main ActionScript code...
... You are able to use it for plain math equations as well, which it will be able to crunch blazingly fast, thanks to multithreading! So any math heavy Flash applications will get a HUGE performance boost, not to mention the various 3D engines and physics engines.
in theory yes, in reality its still all running on the cpu,so,how much cpu ressources are usually left when one does an intense flash game?
well,sure,i forgot,we now all do multi core multi threading cpu and directx 9 shader model 2 requiring flash games to ensure flash runs a 2d action game nicely when moving a few objects around while using up 150 mb ram.
I would think multithreading can be very useful to run process in the background without your hame hanging up.
Though, let's face it ... out of 1000 flash "games", how many "devs" do have the ability to really drive down the GPU road?
In the end the ability of the dev. will show of the project is either large enough or good enough (ie. a game that may actually need all the resources available) ...
I guess that you can do pretty impressive stuff with the new abilities of f10, but you still have to know what you do in order to make that happen.
nGFX