Adobe has added hardware acceleration to the Mac version of Flash Player, promising smoother video performance on the newest Mac models.
Taking advantage of new video acceleration features that Apple implemented in Snow Leopard, Flash Player can now hitch a ride on graphics processors hardware for decoding compressed video.
“The H.264 video codec supported by Flash Player provides excellent quality, but without hardware acceleration, H.264 requires a great deal of CPU processing power to decode,” Adobe says in a tech note.
“In internal testing, we’ve seen dramatic performance improvements — up to two-thirds reduction in CPU utilisation for 1080p H.264 video playback.”
To take advantage, you will need a Mac model that’s less than two years old and running Snow Leopard, though all users should download the latest version of Flash Player, as it also provides several security enhancements.
