Does the Pixel Bender with Flash would use the GPU?

Question

I write a Pixel Bender kernal for my flash.

I know that the pbk would run in another thread.

But when I run my swf, the GPU usage shows 0%.

I want to know does the Pixel Bender with Flash would use the GPU.

What do you monitor GPU usage with by the way? – Moss Feb 03 '11 at 19:47 — Moss, Feb 03 '11 at 19:47
Use the EVEREST, which is powerful. – Mobius Feb 28 '11 at 09:37 — Mobius, Feb 28 '11 at 09:37

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '10 at 11:29

Adobe say this about the GPU in Flash Player 10.1:

"The desktop player still uses software rendering for this release."

Source: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/mobile/WS948100b6829bd5a6-54120f1012593d8f030-8000.html

Also see this: http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-pixel-bender-in-flash-player-10.html

It's a little old, but I believe it still to be true.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '10 at 18:36

As Joony says, PixelBender does not (currently, 2010) use the GPU. But it does run multi-threaded, not just in a different thread. On a multi-core machine (almost all, nowadays) this is still a big performance boost if you need to do a lot of independent computation. ActionScript can only (currently, 2010) run on one thread, while PixelBender can use lots.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 04 '11 at 17:04

March 2011 update: the new Flash Player 11 (Molehill) APIs are GPU accelerated. You can use PixelBender3D [1] in combination with the Program3D class [2] to get GPU acceleration with a software fall-back for incompatible machines.

Notes: PixelBender3D is an update of PixelBender. Also, this will only work with FP11 and not FP10.

Does the Pixel Bender with Flash would use the GPU?

3 Answers3