TIbi says:

This is a true disappointment for me

John O says:

Lee –
There is GPU compositing in Flash Player 10 though. Tinic mentioned it here: http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/what-does-gpu-acceleration-mean.html

But have to be honest, I haven’t seen much about and when I read Tinic’s article, seemed like it was a scary blackbox that could help you or kill you.

Is this something you could talk about or even demo at some point on GTAL?

Fu says:

Ok so Pixel Bender is not GPU accelerated but it’s much more optimized and “close to the metal” than actionscript:
- like alchemy, pixel bender as raw access to the memory. We’re talking of a possible ten-fold acceleration here (like Alchemy which brings also a couple more tricks like function inlining).
- to the contraty of AVM2, pixel bender distributes its workload over all cores of the CPU (so it’s 2x or 4x speedier on most machines): cf. http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-pixel-bender-in-flash-player-10.html

Kevin Newman says:

I have been under the impression that GPU acceleration was removed at the last minute because of performance concerns (without proper understanding of the way GPU acceleration works, you can make things slower, instead of faster). That said, I also thought that PBJ filters do in fact scale across CPU cores – meaning 4 cores, are better than the one you usually get access to with straight AS3 code (though can you call multi-core CPU utilization hardware acceleration?).

Note: I’d love to see an proper API (and education push from Adobe) that would allow GPU acceleration in Flash, through an explicit opt-in model. This would create quite a rich arena for performance optimization, giving you straight AS3 (perhaps with multi-thread extension, like in JS 1.7), the naturally multicore PPJ on CPU that Flash currently supports, as well as a final post process (or maybe async parallel process for sounds and other coolness) on the GPU – so we can get a way to get the benefits of GPU acceleration (maybe we can start calling it OpenCL accel, instead of GPU accel?).

There would be a whole new world to learn when and where GPU acceleration should be used or avoided – this would also open a new world of possibilities with the power of these chips, beyond simple acceleration (and these chips do seem to be turning up everywhere) – and doesn’t that sound fun?

Laurent says:

Hi,
do you know if there is any progress on those GPU acceleration with AIR2.0 and also with pixel bender?
I have been trying to check this with the beta2, but did not manage to get any good news so far? maybe need to regenerate an application with AIR2.00 SDK?