Why does Flash Player 8 on Mac perform so much better? Here is the answer...
I posted an answer to an unrelated question on the FlashCoders mailing list yesterday, but it think some interesting information might have been lost in the process. Anyway, I'll post some of the relevant information here again. It's really in the context of getting some more testing of the Flash Player and stabilize an in essence wonderful but for my personal feeling 'scary' change in the Mac version of the Flash Player:
"You probably have seen that Mac performance is 'slightly' better one some machines, especially under Safari. I should give you a hint why that is. If your Mac is Quartz Extreme capable (that does NOT mean we use Quartz, it just means the hardware requirements are met!), try to profile Safari with some Flash content
by using the OpenGL profiler which is part of the Apple Developer Tools. Add to that some profiling with Shark on a G4 or higher and the answer should be clear :-) This also explains the odd scrolling behavior some of you have noticed in Safari. We are trying to resolve that with Apple in the future, but for now we feel the benefits outweighed that odd behavior. But if you feel strongly about that issue or otherwise see any other weird behavior in Safari please let us know as soon as possible. The reason FireFox and Opera do not work with this enhancement is because of this bug we filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298961"
So, in essence it means that the Flash Player will use OpenGL on OS X 10.2 or newer to display its content if the machine meets the requirements. This is the direct result of working with some Apple engineers which were really helpful in getting us to be confident with these changes. In addition almost every core rendering routine now has an AltiVec implementation, you should see that when profiling using Shark. We spend a lot of time on this in this release.
The bad news is that essentially all G3 based Macs will not see these improvements, some older G4 based Mac which are using ATI Rage 128 cards are also limited in that they and will not support the OpenGL rendering mode. This is because these cards do not support the GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_EXT extension.
But again, if you see anything weird, PLEASE let us know so we can address this as soon as possible. This is why we have public betas. If you have an old Mac around, install Flash Player 8 on it and see if anything breaks.
"You probably have seen that Mac performance is 'slightly' better one some machines, especially under Safari. I should give you a hint why that is. If your Mac is Quartz Extreme capable (that does NOT mean we use Quartz, it just means the hardware requirements are met!), try to profile Safari with some Flash content
by using the OpenGL profiler which is part of the Apple Developer Tools. Add to that some profiling with Shark on a G4 or higher and the answer should be clear :-) This also explains the odd scrolling behavior some of you have noticed in Safari. We are trying to resolve that with Apple in the future, but for now we feel the benefits outweighed that odd behavior. But if you feel strongly about that issue or otherwise see any other weird behavior in Safari please let us know as soon as possible. The reason FireFox and Opera do not work with this enhancement is because of this bug we filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298961"
So, in essence it means that the Flash Player will use OpenGL on OS X 10.2 or newer to display its content if the machine meets the requirements. This is the direct result of working with some Apple engineers which were really helpful in getting us to be confident with these changes. In addition almost every core rendering routine now has an AltiVec implementation, you should see that when profiling using Shark. We spend a lot of time on this in this release.
The bad news is that essentially all G3 based Macs will not see these improvements, some older G4 based Mac which are using ATI Rage 128 cards are also limited in that they and will not support the OpenGL rendering mode. This is because these cards do not support the GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_EXT extension.
But again, if you see anything weird, PLEASE let us know so we can address this as soon as possible. This is why we have public betas. If you have an old Mac around, install Flash Player 8 on it and see if anything breaks.
posted by Tinic Uro at 8:27 PM
58 Comments:
I'd be a lot happier if the Flash 8 IDE didn't suck as bad as it does now.
for Mac OS X I mean...
Very, very cool. Hardware acceleration in Flash.
So Where can we download Flash Player 8 for Mac?
The public beta is available here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/public_beta/
Will the G3 Macs see any speed improvement at all with Flash Player 8? What is the minimum requirement to see improvement on a G4? Is there a way to upgrade a G3 so it can take advantage of Flash Player 8?
I notice this seems to be far more beneficial to some flash productions than others; is there any chance we could get some hints on how to take advantage of these newfound features best?
This would be very beneficial; a lot of other technologies I ues seem to far outperform Flash, but usually we have a lot of guidelines to follow on how to optimize or we can dig through source to figure it out ourselves.
Wondering if windowless mode also benefits from these accelerations ?
The flash player 8.0.5.0 is so slow on mac i cant believe you can say anything has been improved , i can run animations on a celeron 333 faster on Fp7 than I can on an imac g5 , it is embarassing , using safari on mac and firefox on pc btw , i dont know technical details i think this says it more http://www.powerflasher.de/bench/res.php macs are way down the list , but i do know slow and the mac performance sucks
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This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
So why is this only on Mac, I think windows Players should also use OpenGL for playback of flash, I mean how can you talk about improvements in Flash Player 8 when a normal tween causes a choppy / teared animation. (see http://www.everflash.com/flash/choppytest.html)
The problem with the player in windows is that it does not check for any vertical retrace to happen before drawing to the screen, so you actually see parts of 2 frames in one screen image.
This can be changed using OpenGL.
Performance seemed up somewhat in earlier betas, now it seems back down.
To Nox:
Microsoft is not pushing OpenGL they have DirectX 9.x has you know. So Macromedia has to write Flash especially for that. MS Vista will likeky have the same 'outdated' version of OpenGL as XP does not. (Eventhough it is badly supported by MS, rumour has it is faster on PC than on Macintosh.)
As for OpenGL, the performance will improve when OpenGL improves and as Flash takes better advantage of hardware acceleration.
You seem to be very excited about the open GL addition, yet the macs performance - even with the open GL addition, performs like a snail in comparrison to even an old PC.
Where is the bottle neck in this? why is it so hard for macromedia to fix this issue? Perhaps now that Adobe owns you, your programmers might retain some insight on how to write programs for the mac that actually perform to its potential?
I must ask you, and this is an honest question here and with no attempt to be snide .... Is there a _deliberate_ attempt at macromedia to make flash player totally suck on the mac, or is it just pure incompetency?
I think I'm going to assume a combination of the two.
We were fed the same apparently-empty PR-dictated lines (lies?) about flash player 7 and its claims of improved performance on the mac. So, based on past experiences, I think I have a bit of evidence to claim BS.
I can crunch video at a blistering rate and run photoshop smoothly on my G5, but my 350MHZ dusty compaq can tear through even simple flash animations like 10 times faster. It's truly embarrassing.
I don't know where these comparisons of 335mHz PCs out performing G5 iMacs in flahs tests? I have a dual 1.25 G4 and instantly noticed a speed increase when I swithced to Flash 8 player. I also have a newly cleaned out 1 gHz HP computer and my mac blows it away (as it should).
Mind you though, I still feel that Macromedia still has a lot of work to do, to full take advantage of openGL altevec ect. But then again you know that they are biding their time. The Mactels will change a lot.
I hate to agree to this, but it's true. The Flash player for both Firefox and Safari are completely inferior to the PC Flash Player. I've been designing and programming in Flash for years and I've worked on both platforms and though I'd love to stay with apple for many reasons, but I have to go back to PC for this reason alone.
It's ashame. My G4 1.67 lappy is amazing in so many ways, but my Alienware A-51 Laptop just blows it away in the Flash output department.
whats it gonna take for you guys to get this right? its a shame.
Please tell if you have found any solution for the flash-player- runnig-slow-on-mac problem. I have a deadline and i cannot focus on working since my client is complaining that my scripts are running very slow on his mac. thank you very much...
wow, I've been searching for something on this for some time. i've read this OpenGL business also. ive been designing on a mac g5 (not dual) with over 2 gigs of ram, and it chugs running flash (the authoring application) there is an overall lag in interface control (dragging keyframes etc...) compared to the pc. Likewise, as someone else has noted, the playback of flash content on a mac is somewhere in the range of 35-50% decrease in fps compared to pc/directx. Oddly enough, i have seen some flash content play smoother on a mac-on big production movie sites; i don't know what these developers are doing to make the content perform better on a mac, but i have seen it and I'd wish they'd share-or atleast like to see macromedia say something about it.
I dont think its smart of macromedia to talk of a big increase in performance. People aren't stupid, they'll try it and experience the same chug.
In closing, I like the mac, it's pretty, it's stable for video/ae/photoshop etc...but when it comes to interactive/programming/web dev. the mac just seems plagued with problems. i also think the mouse acceleration issues in osx are stupid considering apple's whole identity.
It's funny...you would think that Macromedia (Adobe now) would at least respond to the huge number of developers having problems. At least tell us that you know that peformance is embarrassing on the Mac. But, what we get instead is silence. I'm sure like others, I have invested a huge amount of time and money with flash. Wether you like it or not, Macs are greatly used. So, wether it's an Apple related issue or Macromedia/Adobe issue, it's time to fix it. Since Flash 4, the player has been poor and has limited developers from doing complex animations. Even the authoring tool slows down after using it for some time.
Please do something...or if some other startup is reading this, make a flash package that works from start to finish.
Flash 8 is very slow on OS X and Macromedia hasn't done much to fix it.
Hello, I just wantet to add that my Flash Player (on Mac OS X Tiger) also sucks, and it's a shame to have a powerfull machine and have to be switching from time to time to a windows machine to test my work. Rather than any other video, audio, graphics improvement I would prefer getting that anoying slow performance fixed.
It is February 2006 and just last sunday I went to the Apple Store in my local mall. They had an internet connection on all the latest dual core, dual cpu Macs with gobs of ram, and 2Gighz per cpu, and good 3D video cards, the latest upgrade patches to Safari and OSX. I proceeded to test cool Flash websites that run fast on any PC, even POS old Celerons from 1999...OMG... The latest and greatest, most powerful Macs ever built with the new Intel CPU's are still pathetic at playing Flash!! I think this goes to show that even with the same CPU, same RAM, same video card, that there is still yet 1 last thing slowing down all Macs... and that is the OS! I bet if someone were able to hook up the Mac Intel CPU and run it on WindowsXP or hell even Windows95, it would run circles around any version of Mac OS when comparing Flash playback of the same flash movie. Apple better start using WinXP or Vista for the next upgrade to finally bring Macs into the PC realm of web browsing without slow/choppy performance..
im using a winodows xp home and im getting this macromedia flash player 8 and im getting is a scrip run slowly if it continues your computer may become unresponsive, do you want to abort the scrip yes or no ive did both mmmmmmm used to use 6 and 7 but did an upgrade to 8 and its freezes in games dont know why this is but it would be nice to know :-)
haha, i posted earlier about the crap performance of macs with flash. it's pretty funny this intel thing - "Let's give this mac a PC brain and see if it can perform better." haha.
And still, no dice.
I love the new commercial too - nice damage control. For years intel chips have been trapped in pcs -
translation: for years we've tried not to admit defeat to superior chip architecture in pcs, now its time to start assimilating.
Lets not talk about memory bus architecture on the mac either. So many people thinking they are 'thinking different', completely ripped off...
You can trade your car in and buy a powerPC from apple only to watch a 12fps flash site. And for you elitist mac users, its time to wake up and smell the burning of your power source, cpu fan, logic board and/or capacitors...
Sorry to go on an antimac rant, but my imac G5 at work just died again for the billionth time - the newest glitch with our imacs is they will freeze and then the fan will start going haywire sounding like its about to blast off like a rocket!
in closing, on a positive note, macs are pretty...i almost want to eat one.
OK let's be honest Flash 8 is slow on a Mac and eats lots of CPU. But I still don't understand why? It is so slow that I sometimes think that it actually uses a Windows emulator and didn't bother to write version for Mac :)
Come on guys - get real. It's not the OS that slows Flash on Macs down (every other benchmark is at least comparable to WinPCs). It's the Player software that stinks. Blame Macromedia/Adobe - they just don't care.
Monday March 6, 2006
(yes this blog software forgot to include date stamping, thats awesome, now we can tell exactly what time everyone put up a comment but we will never know what day or year! kick ass! duh!)
It is the OSX slowing it down.
OSX is not very good at handling multiple task windows, which is a hint of why Flash is soo slow. Flash movies that slow down the most on the Macs have music, high speed animation, complex code, multiple semi-transparent objects animated on the screen, and with Flash 8 we now have dynamic effects like drop shadow and flames... All of this is just too much for the Mac OS to handle at once. reduce a flash movie to one simple element and you can get a mac to run the animation smoothly at 30 FPS, but forget about it if you push the FPS up to 60, the mac will just ignore this and run it at 30 instead. add more than 1 thing to be animated and the movie chugs along. This means that the OS wants complete CPU control over 1 element.
On the PC, for years now, Flash can have multiple animated objects on the screen and we have no slow down. I think this must be because the PC can handle multiple objects/tasks better than the mac OS.
It could be from better CPU handling, better RAM management, better video card integration, better ram bandwidth.. it be a mix of all these things. What we need here is someone who works at an PC overclocking magazine to take one of the test Macs with the intel dual core CPUS and break the security in it so he can install Windows XP on it. He will then need to somehow get drivers for any possible remaining parts in the mac that are mac exclusive.. which should not be much since now macs use Intel architecture and standard DDR Ram. Then try visiting a Flash website and compare it with a PC. I would compare it with an older PC that is shown to easily out perform a stock mac-off-the-shelf. and then compare it with a standard 2003'ish PC like 2.8 gighz intel, and then compare it with a top of the line intel and AMD.I bet on WinXP the mac would perform around the same as a 1.4 Gighz Intel P4 which is more than enough power to be able to view any flash animation without slowdown.
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It's just a simple as this:
Flash 6 -8 is slow on OSX because:
1. They know what's wrong but: Macromedia-Adobe doesn't want to spend money on fixing the player for Power PC users. (There aren't that many Mac users, yeah right)
or
2. They don't know why the IBM cpu doesn't handle flash as they expected.
What I and others found out between june 2005 till now, march 2006:
-Macromedia helpdesk keeps saying "We never heard of Flash slow on Mac"
-Flash developers start talking about "OpenGl" like that has got anything to do with it
-Developers must develop Flash on Mac AND pc to see the huge differnce in timing, due to the performance issue
Let me just give you my performance top 3:
1. PC, Intel P4 running WindowsXP
2. PC Intel P4 runnning OSX for Intel
3. G5 IBM CPU running OSX
Yes everything is updated and just watch that typical number 2 in the list, OSX runnung on a P4....
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And yes, another thing:
Why do you think Apple never puts flash in their great demo's?
I seem to belong in the "slow"-camp. My Mac Mini PPC 1.25 Ghz spends 100% CPU time trying to play the videos at video.google.com.
They are obviously not hardware accelerated, as there is no bilinear filtering going on, and the video can't play smoothly, going very choppy at less than half the frame rate of the video. I know this is a problem, because just about any other videoplayer, even the very crappy Windows Media Player 9 for Mac can play videos of that size smoothly without problems.
But my little IBM Thinkpad Celeron 500 Mhz laptop with Ubuntu Linux and less than half the graphics power of the Mac Mini can play them nice and smooth. My desktop PC plays them perfectly with full hardware acceleration.
Something is very wrong here, and I can't confirm any of the "improvements" at all in the article that was now posted almost 9 months ago!
Even small Flash animations on sites causes the CPU load to go to 80-100% and the browser becomes unresponsive, and it doesn't matter which browser I use. This is never a problem on Windows or Linux.
If I filter out flash animations, there are never problems with browsing.
What's the story on this?
I think that with each new version of Flash, it gets slower and slower. I never had this many problems with Flash on my old 233mhz PBG3 with 160MB ram and 10.3, thankyouverymuch.
I'm using a 400mhz PBG3 now, 256RAM and 10.4 these days and it's just slow as a dog.
I still blame Firefox for some of the slowness, but this is just crazy.
Get your act together, Adobe.
Does Flash have it's roots in Java?
Maybe it's got something to do that. Java has always been a dog on Mac OS. Many interpreted languages suffer performance loss on the Mac OS by comparison to Win.
I'd be happy in Flash 8 ran faster on my Mac. I'd be happy if it ran at all, as I can't install it.
I download the latest version, hit Install and everything goes fine until the final two items when I get the messagage 'error creating file. 1008:5,-5000 Access denied error' followed by 'You do not have enough access privileges for this installation'.
Flash help page tells me to:
Open Internet Explorer.
Choose Tools then Internet Options.
Select the Security tab.
Choose Internet.
Ensure that "Download Signed ActiveX controls" and "Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins" are not disabled.
but I can't even get to step two -- there's no Internet Options under the Tools menu (IE5.2, MacOSX), and Flash Tech Help are no help at all.
Can anyone help me with this?
info@graemedawes.co.uk
It is clear to me that there is some sort of virtualization going on in the OSX flash player. My macbook can do amazing real-time windowed opengl processing using only 10-20% cpu. We're talking 20-30 layers of rotating translating mutating semi-transparent layers in a 800x600 borderless window at 60 fps vsync lock. No flash animation has ever done this sort of stuff.
Then I can fire up a 200x200px flash animation in safari, and the damn thing takes 50% of all cycles, doing very trivial graphics operations like scale-translate 1-bit-transparent sprites, and rarely tops 15fps. My SNES does a better job!
Granted the way OSX handles normal application stuff is to draw into a texture, and then flush to opengl. But this is pretty easy to work around, i think? just toss down an opengl view, and then render all your flash content into opengl content. Then all the drawing operations happen async from the WindowServer.
I am having the same problem, I cant even install it. It says I dont have enough access priveleges, I made sure i was logged in as the admin User, does anyone know what to do? Im on a G5 mac
I can't install it either. I get the same unhelpful "access denied" error message (as an admin user). OS 10.3.9, G4.
same issue. logged in as admin and says I don't have rights. I uninstalled previous versions and now can't reinstall those for same reasons.
i play yahtzee on atari an i just get on playing a game an up it comes about 20 times that flash player 8 is running to slow can it be fixed an if it can how come no one has fixed it yet.is there any thing else a person can use instead of flash player 8 .who operates this do they not care about it.
i'm sad the flashplayer 8 on my powerbook 1.5 mhz still sucks!!!!! i'm a developer and allways i have to test my staff on a pc platform that is embarassing for me and for apple!!!! improuvements.... bullshit.
p.s. sorry if my english is like the flashplayer 8
It's been forever since the guy bashing Mac OS X last posted, but I do want to say this much to him. You OBVIOUSLY don't know what you're talking about. OS X is light years ahead of XP and you're just bashing it because you don't know anything about it. The problem is Adobe Flash Player and any idiot can see that.
He's not bashing Apple at all. The fact that he uses an apple notebook would prove such. He says its embarrassing for Apple because of appearances. He's unable to test his work on his mac, because of the flash player on his machine, probably catches flak from his windows using buddies for it
could the author of this blog let us know of his thoughts on these comments?
I find that flash runs at around 20% on my g4. This is intolerably neglegent.
I don't have anything but experience to contribute to this conversation. I own my own web-development company. I build on a Compaq Presario running WinXP. Consistently I find that I'll be satisfied with my work only to have my clients call me back and complain that the animation is running 'painfully' slow. I ask, "What platform?" Mac, mac, mac. Everytime.
This is such a tremendous issue. What am I supposed to do? Build a unique animation for each platform?
It is also very heart-breaking that Adobe has not acknowledged this problem. I guess I understand the politics of it, but for gad's sake, get this fixed soon!!
http://isuzu.underground-bunker.com
Consistently crashes safari on MAC, its fine in Firefox. We are using the latest adobe player...
Regards
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I think we should report this BUG to Adobe and keep doing it until they fix it.
Report bugs: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer
More info:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=184&threadid=1277624&CFID=16497628&CFTOKEN=3d296361b5f097bb-82E39063-0A33-86E4-56166139BED591C7&jsessionid=12126e867d9067615372
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