Faster Flash Player 10 coming

Gomi · Jul 6, 2008

Ever envied your PC toting friends running Flash websites much faster than your Mac? Envy no more! Adobe Labs has just posted a pre-release (warning: beta software) version 10 of the ubiquitous Flash plugin for most browsers.

Here's a quip from one of the developers:

If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference.
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... and more...

We have identified the bottleneck in the Flash Player for OSX. Like in the other plugins the culprit is text rendering, in this case rendering using device text. This benchmark spends >50% in a single OSX function: ATSUGetUnjustifiedBounds. You can verify this yourself using Shark. I am working on a change which will cache the results returned by that API to where this call should completely disappear from the performance profile.

If everything turns out well I hope to see that change in future release. Some new numbers on my Mac Pro (note that these represent numbers which can change at any time if we decide to do things differently):

Before the change: ~8.5fps
After the change: ~28fps in Safari (~26fps in Firefox)

(On the same machine I get this for the HTML test: Firefox 3 RC3: ~14fps, Safari 3.1.1: ~21fps, WebKit nightly: ~42fps)

These numbers are for the plugin. There are still issues with the plugin API on OSX. I assume other plugins will also hit a ceiling. When I use the standalone Flash Player I get this:

Before the change: ~9fps
After the change: ~42fps

I should also point out the 3+ different ways you can render text in Flash. If you want to be totally fair you should embed a font and render it using the different anti-aliasing options. This is closer to what Silverlight and Java do.

Lastly I want to mention that the Flash Player is optimized for both x86 and PPC. It always has been. But these kind of benchmarks are really useful for us to identify platform specific bottlenecks like in this case.
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Finally! Some decent Flash performance!

Get the Adobe Flash Player 10 BETA 2 here.

Faster Flash Player 10 coming

Gomi Active Member

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Faster Flash Player 10 coming

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