Netbook Review UK

FPS Compared on Netbooks with Flash

Adobe released a pre-release version of its Flash Player 10.1 last night which adds  hardware support for HD Flash video.    That means, if you have a supported video card, it will now be able to assist in decoding flash video on the web.  That translates into more frames per second when watching Youtube, Hulu or any other site utilizing flash video.  Now, watching 720p, or even 1080p on netbooks won’t be such a choppy affair.  Two popular grahics chipsets on netbooks are supported – namely the Nvidia Ion chipset and Intel’s GMA 4500MHD.

Read on for the real world test results.

Laptop Magazine put Flash Player 10.1 beta on  their HP Mini 311 notebook with NVIDIA ION graphics, and an Acer Aspire 1810T with GMA 4500MHD graphics.  Playback of a 1080p HD video on YouTube went from an unwatchable 0.6 frames per second to a perfectly acceptable 22 frames per second when using Flash 10.1 . Not as dramatic on the Acer Laptop, but the same HD YouTube video doubled its framerate,  from 11 fps to 22.

AnandTech also ran a series of tests with a NVIDIA ION chipset and produced similar results and also noted that CPU utilization also dropped dramatically as a result of the video decoding processes being offloaded from the processor to the graphics processing unit (Nvidia Ion). AnandTech also noted that AMD had yet to release the drivers necessary to take advantage of Flash Player 10.1.