Adobe and NVIDIA have officially announced support for hardware acceleration for NVIDIA ION graphics. In other words, low power laptops with Intel Atom processors and NVIDIA ION graphics like the HP Mini 311 will soon be able to play 720p and 1080p Flash video from the web without breaking a sweat.
This isn't a huge surprise. The companies announced they were working together earlier this year, and a few days ago a German site posted a demo video showing an HP Mini 311 playing HD Flash content. That video has since been removed, but Notebooks.com has posted a new video showing a Mini 311 playing 1080p Flash video.
Xavier from Notebooks.com tells me that NVIDIA and Adobe officials just demonstrated the new technology at NVIDIA's GPU conference in San Jose, California.
What's exciting about this development is the fact that high bitrate and high definition Flash video have up until now relied on a computer's CPU for playback. If you have a relatively low power processor like an Intel Atom chip, or even some single core Intel CULV processors, you're not going to be able to pump out full screen high quality Flash video smoothly. Even watching standard definition video from Hulu on a 1366 x 768 pixel display is difficult unless you like to think of your TV programs as radio plays set to a slideshow.
For netbooks with 1024 x 600 pixel displays, this isn't as big an issue since most standard definition video looks fine in full screen. But with netbooks and mini-laptops continuing to come out with larger and higher resolution displays, and with web video becomes more and more popular, Adobe really had to do something to address the situation. Of course, creating a less resource-intensive version of Flash would have been another option. HD video in Microsoft's Silverlight format looks great in full screen on some laptops that can't handle HD Flash.
As exciting as this development is, last I heard, the next generation Adobe Flash software with NVIDIA hardware acceleration won't be available until 2010.
You can check out Xavier's hands-on video with an HP Mini 311 playing HD Flash after the break.
Post from: Liliputing
Adobe Flash 10.1 to support hardware acceleration for HD video
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