Punch drunk Adobe has just released the latest beta of their Flash Player for Mac, and while we wouldn’t be caught dead installing it on our new Airs, for the rest of Mac owners, it may very well represent a substantial performance improvement over Flash Player 10.1.
The biggest new feature in Flash Player 10.2 is “Stage Video” which Adobe claims will allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Basically, Stage Video is a full embrace of the GPU, offloading the entirety of the video rendering pipeline — from H.264 decoding to color conversion and scaling — to your Mac’s graphics chip.
Unfortunately, Stage Video has a hitch: it’s not backwards compatible, so websites will have to update to use the latest APIs for their video players before you see any improvement using Stage Video.
If you’re interested in giving the latest Beta a try, it can be downloaded here.
