Adobe Updates Flash 10 Beta - Now Slightly Less Inefficient!
Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?From a viewer's standpoint, there are several new features of interest. Tops among them: advanced 3d effects - that's right, Flash now supports shaders. Web gamers rejoice, because this no doubt means a whole new era of addictive browser-based gaming.
Sound APIs have been refined as well, which should provide a boost not only for games, but also for streaming media applications. Also along these lines, Flash 10 support dynamic bitrate adjustments. Translation: it'll adapt to crappy network conditions automatically so that your video doesn't get all choppy.
There have also been hardware tweaks added, which Adobe claims will take some of the historically terrible CPU load and move it to the GPU. A little Download Squad testing on nickjr.com's games showed an improvement from about 82% CPU utilization before installing Flash 10 Beta to about 55% after. Ram use was improved as well, down about 40% on the same SWF.Just about everything else that comprises the core of Flash has been tweaked. Numerous improvements have also been made to the text API, and better antialiasing has been introduced. That means improvements to the overall appearance of text, especially for Asian characters - as in words and letters, not Charlie Chan.
Adobe has full release notes available on their Labs site, and are showcasing a demo of Astro's shiny, new 3d effects on the Flash Player 10 page. It goes without saying, but make sure you uninstall your old plugin and install the beta before you try it out.