Flash Player to harness hardware acceletarion

Soon, Flash Player is going to start making use of GPUs power for video and graphics acceleration. This is a feature that the Flash 3D community is clamoring for quite some time now. Nobody is saying how soon though, maybe on the next version of the player? I hope so.

This expands the currently available hardware acceleration in the FP which I believe is geared for scaling, particularly in fullscreen mode.



Here is an nVidia press release that announces the collaboration. This makes me think though, what happens if I have an ATI Video Board? Are we going to start recognizing hardware now as we routinelly do with browsers?

Here's an answer to this question with the currently available FP hardware acceleration from Adobe so that we can get a hold of the complexity that this could bring to the table:

Will hardware-accelerated scaling work on all computers?

For hardware-accelerated scaling to work, you need Microsoft® DirectX 9 with VRAM 128 MB for Windows and OpenGL for Apple® Macintosh®, OS X v10.2 or higher. There might be compatibility issues with older hardware and drivers. (See Flash Player system requirements.) With older versions of Flash Player, you should not see dramatic changes as the player reverts from hardware-accelerated scaling back to software scaling.