Flash 10.1 RC offers better netbook performance

Adobe has made the Release Candidate of Flash 10.1 available for download, addressing some hardware acceleration issues and fixing a number of video playback bugs found in the five-month-old beta release.

Support for hardware-assisted H.264 video playback on a variety of netbook graphics chipsets should bring with it not only improved performance, but lower system overheads too one of the chief reasons put forward by Apple boss Steve Jobs recently for the company's refusal to incorporate Flash support into its products.

"A pre-release version of Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris operating systems," read an announcement on Adobe Labs' website.

"This public pre-release is an opportunity for developers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content," Adobe said. "Consumers can try the pre-release of Flash Player 10.1 to preview hardware acceleration of video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks."

Aside from addressing a variety of known issues, the RC release contains no significant changes to the beta release, with Adobe saying it has spent the last five months focusing on "general stability and performance improvements".

But Flash 10.1 is nonetheless a significant release, particularly for low-power CPUs. Being able to offload video-decoding to the GPU provided the graphics hardware is actually supported reduces the demand on the CPU.

Graphics-intensive tasks such as gaming or HD video playback are likely to see the greatest improvement both traditional areas of weakness for mobile CPUs found in the likes of netbooks and smartphones.

The full list of graphics hardware that will benefit from Flash 10.1's hardware acceleration is available in the release notes PDF from Adobe, while Flash 10.1 itself can be downloaded now from the Adobe Labs website. There is no indication as yet as to when the final release will be ready.