Flash players are one of the most massively used applications on the internet, be it for simple advertising or even streaming video. It serves everything, with simplicity in code. But, this simplicity comes with a huge performance issue tag. Once  you use a netbook, you will understand what I am talking about.

Netbooks are designed in such a way that, their sole purpose is to browse the net, send emails, watch videos online, etc. That’s it. But when people actually started using these netbooks, they noticed something wierd, which no one had taken note of before. They saw that the flash videos that they streamed from the internet, used to make their netbooks awfully slow.

Flash video, uses a lot of system resources, when playing the animation on it’s platform. Adobe, purchased Flash from Macromedia a few years back. This application, basically utilizes the CPU to it’s maximum while streaming any kind of media. This makes the computer with lower amount of resources to supply, crawl on it’s all fours. Nvidia, with their latest innovation of using the GPU for video processing, presented to the world how they made use of the parallel streamlined processors on the graphics cards, to process RAW video to compressed formats in almost no time. Basically, the faster your GFX, the slower the processing time.

This shift of process handling to the GPU to a lot of load off from the CPUs. To follow suit, Adobe and Nvidia have come together to tackle this problem of CPU harnessing of the Flash player. At the Computex, Taipei, Nvidia announced that they will be collaborating as a part of an Open Screen Project with Adobe, to optimize the performance of the Flash player. Here’s an extract from the Nvidia’s site:

Adobe Flash Player will be accelerated across the range of NVIDIA processors, including NVIDIA Tegra™, enabling users to enjoy uncompromised Web browsing, full H.264 video playback, and rich, consistent Flash technology based content any time, any place, and on any platform.

NVIDIA is also participating in the Open Screen Project, a broad initiative of 25 industry leaders to deliver a consistent runtime environment across devices. Led by Adobe, the Open Screen Project is dedicated to enable Web content and standalone applications across desktops, netbooks, mobile devices, televisions, and other consumer electronics that take advantage of Adobe Flash Platform capabilities.

“NVIDIA and Adobe share precisely the same vision – visually compelling applications running on every device,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager, Handheld Business at NVIDIA. “Consumers don’t have to sacrifice streaming video performance on small inexpensive platforms such as netbooks. A Tegra-based platform enables the rich, smooth playback they expect from a desktop PC.”

“NVIDIA’s unique expertise makes it an ideal partner for Adobe to integrate cutting-edge graphics and video acceleration into the Adobe Flash Platform, benefiting all types of devices,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Flash Player will leverage the power of the GPU to provide a rich, desktop-compatible Web experience on a wide range of devices.”

Hopefully, if Nvidia and Adobe live up to their promise and work on this issue, Netbook users will rejoice with the next update in the flash player, most probably the 11th version of this behemoth of a player.

For TechMirage,
Pranav Shirodkar