Flash 10.1 doesn’t help video playback…

Adobe have just released Flash 10.1 Player and I was hoping that it would include GPU acceleration, just like the Windows version. Why is this important? Next time you open up YouTube, LoveFilm, or the BBC iPlayer, take a look in Activity Monitor. I bet you’ll see your web browser chewing up loads of CPU power (in fact I’ve sometimes seen Flash banner ads on websites cause the browser to take 150% CPU activity).

GPU acceleration pushes some of the complex video decoding off to the graphics card, means your CPU has less work to do, meaning your Mac doesn’t chug like a pig playing video. There’s a development Flash Player that supports GPU Acceleration on some NVIDIA based Macs, but unfortunately my MacBook Pro uses an ATI video card, so I’m going to have to put up with screaming fans for a while yet…