Flash Gala plugin with hardware decoding actually performs worse on some Macs

Apr 30, 2010 - 3 Comments

flash gala performance

Adobe just can’t get a break with Flash on the Mac. Before you get too excited about the Flash Gala plugin, you might want to look at these performance results from Engadget. The new MacBook Pro with a Core i7 processor performed quite well with the beta Gala plugin, with CPU utilization going down anywhere from 30%-50%, but it’s brother with a Core i5 processor performed significantly worse than using the Flash player without hardware decoding, with processor utilization going up 20%.

What gives? Well, it’s basically beta software and Apple just recently opened access to the hardware, so there’s obviously a lot of room for optimization to be had. For the time being though, if you like running dodgy development builds and have a Mac with a GeForce 9400M, 320M, or 330M GPU, you can check out the beta plugin at Adobe Labs. Personally, we’d wait a while.

I don’t know about anyone else but I’d love to know Steve Jobs thoughts on this particular benchmark since he is such a fan of Flash, just for comic value alone.

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Posted by: Manish Patel in Mac OS

3 Comments

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  1. Wim Pete says:

    Leave it to Apple to make hardware acceleration on Mac OS X such a pain.

    It’s not just flash, just look at benchmarks for the newly released STEAM. It appears that Mac OS X was never meant to do fast efficient screen refreshes!

    Closing your hardware to third parties doesn’t help either.

    Hardware acceleration for flash and other plugins has worked in windows since 1995.

  2. Harold says:

    Leave it to Adobe to finally get direct hardware access after whining about it for so long and then make Flash suck even more. So now that they no longer can blame it on hardware access, what’s the excuse? And how the hell is it even possible to be SLOWER when you have DIRECT access to the hardware? Are there any competent engineers at Adobe?

  3. STEVE JOBBYS says:

    HAHA! Hardware acceleration and you *STILL* suck! Die Flash die!

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