How Flash is your Vide Card?

OK So this may sound a bit geeky as there are numbers in it but it’s still interesting!
Flash H.264 video decoding, the process by which high-definition content is streamed and played from the internet to your screen, has always been a bit of a processor hog. On low-powered machines running 720p resolution, for example, it is not unusual to see processor occupancy in the 80-90% range and, on machines like these, you can forget about 1080p “Full HD” altogether.
Enter the pre-release version of Flash 10.1, trumpeting the inclusion of GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding. What this means to us is that our low-powered machines, as long as they are equipped with a suitable graphics card (nVidia G80 series or higher, Radeon HD4000 or higher – full details to be confirmed) can now run H.264 content with a processor occupancy typically half that of the CPU only decoding. Effectively, Flash 10.1 makes better use of your hardware and gives your graphics card something else to do when it is not playing games for you.
Even more interestingly, this will broaden the 1080p space since with Flash 10.1 there will be significantly more machines able to run Full HD resolution. We believe that the more genuinely useful applications that are built to exploit multiple cores, graphics cards etc., the greater the demand for this hardware and therefore, the larger the target market for even MORE cool applications leveraging this next-generation technology. Sometimes the conclusion is really simple; more is better!
As an IT Support Company we welcome advancements in graphics capability so that during our lunchbreak we can play “network shoot em up’s”