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.
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