3d to flash, too late?

[TOdorus]

So with a GPU to take care of all the rendering, and the CPU being used how it should be, all the calculations/physics/processing etc, the performance skyrockets even if AS3 runs at the same speed.

And another plus of that would be, that it speeds up 2D as well as 3D. I can imagine that Adobe will have a hard time pulling that off though. Flash is designed around the CPU for quite a while now, that's some pretty core stuff to change around, not to mention backward, GPU and platform compatibility.

I think this all ties in with bluemagica's point:

And with the huge number of 3d games with quality graphics these days, if we have to stick to graphics like dos games, even though it will be 3d, it will be rated worse than 2d. So I won't get my hopes up till flash brings up something solid to show.

It's all rather pointless if the 3D looks terrible compared to good 2D art. I'd rather have a huge rendering performance boost with no 3D libraries than crappy native 3D support. There are libraries for that already.

On a more personal note: I don't think there really have been that many good 3D gamedesigns. Most of the time 3D is just used to have some good eyecandy, but the gamedesign is 2D. If I would make a Diablo-clone for instance, I'd like to use a 3D engine for the shading/lighting effects to give some oomph to the atmosphere. This adds more to the production value than gamedesign though. Some genres use 3D in their core gameplay but fail to use it in a novel way (Consider games like Descent, Portal or Dead Space against the overwhelming amount of other titles). As I'm a designer/coder first and then an artist I find 3D a bit overrated.

So in conclusion: just upgrade the rendering proces. Native 3D support is more of a gadget.