Good News: Flash Player 11 is Out. Please Upgrade!

Oct 9, 2011 // by page.lysupportadmin // Blog, Software // No Comments

Adobe has shipped a new version of Flash Player, FP 11. That’s great news for G-Wizard Editor as FP 11 provides direct access to your computer’s graphics card, which makes graphics code up to 1000x faster. GWE does a whole lot more than just graphics, but this will really help GWE’s backplot to be smoother and faster. Of course, there are some things that have to happen first. Specifically, I have to do some major updating on GWE’s backplotter code to make use of the newfound power.

Unfortunately, once I make that upgrade, GWE will only work with FP 11 or later–FP 10 stops working. Rather than inconvenience very many of you who may be a tad slow to upgrade, I must therefore wait until the audience of FP 11 users is large enough before I make the change. The way I intend to do that is by monitoring visitors to my web site. Google Analytics tells me which versions of Flash my visitors have installed. Just this weekend, FP 11 was the second most popular version, with around 21% of users. FP 10.3 was the most popular, with 48% of users. Considering that 10.3 was just released in June, and we’re only in October, that was only 4 months ago. Based on that, it seems likely we’ll reach some kind of critical mass with FP 11 by end of year.

Please help by upgrading sooner!

You can wait until Flash asks to upgrade, but you can also go straight over to Adobe’s site here and get the upgrade now. Note that existing Flash software will still run on FP 11, it’ll even run faster, it just won’t take full advantage until the software is rewritten to use the new FP 11 features.

Flash Player 11 does game console grade 3D graphics…

If you’re curious about Flash Player 11, Adobe has basically delivered the graphical power of a game console with Flash. The demos are pretty amazing to watch if you like video games. Hopefully they’ll be equally as amazing for g-code simulation. We’ll see.

There’s another major innovation due out in a future release of Flash Player and that’s the ability to use more cpu cores. Currently, Flash is pretty severely limited on how many cpu cores it will use. FP 11 will help by moving most of the graphics rendering off the limited cpu cores and onto the graphics card. The ability to access more cores will have a huge impact on GWE performance. Adobe hasn’t released word of which FP release will have multi-core workers yet, but they do player releases every quarter, so I’m hoping we’ll see it next quarter–Q1 2012.