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androidflashhardware-acceleration

Android flash player gpu acceleration

I was searching for information about hardware acceleration of the flash player platform on android and all I found was fuzzy.

I found that hardware acceleration (with the gpu using opengl es) can be done using the stage video on android but only for Honeycomb and more specifically for android 3.0.1. (ref - flash 10.1 release note)

But I found something strange. For the tegra 2 soc, there was a specific build of the flash player 10.1 that used opengl es to boost the flash player performance (ref - from nvidia whitepaper : "Bringing High-End Graphics to Handheld Devices")

At the time there was two specific build of the flash player 10.1, a generic one for all android platform and another for all tegra 2 based devices. But from flash player 10.2, there was no more fragmentation builds and it seems that the tegra 2 optimization were integrated in the 10.2 build.

I have some questions about all of that:

  1. Does flash player support gpu hardware acceleration ? (it seems to be the case but why at a time it was only for tegra 2? Do these optimizations work for all high end devices with a gpu?)
  2. It also seems that the stage video can be used to boost h264 video decoding and rendering on the screen. but why it required Honeycomb if it's only using opengl ES...? (obviously I think it does NOT only used opengl thanks to that requirement. So what does it use?)
  3. I also found some information about the future molehill 3D api (ref from adobe) for the flash player which leverage opengl es (for android, directX on windows, ...) and it just looks like what the nvidia white paper said about the tegra platform... so what's the difference between the tegra optimizations and this future api boost performance ?

edit: I'm still searching for answers but any clue or more detailed information are welcome if someone know something about it :)

Solution

  • with Adobe's surprise dropping of support for flash player the other month, this is probably even more unlikely. I would really like to see them release a hardware accelerated version of the mobile player before calling it quits. I have heard that RIM is going to continue to develop releases of the mobile player on their tablets and enable the stage3d hardware acceleration. I guess we'll just have to see what happens.