NVIDIA shows Ion accelerating 720p Flash video
updated 02:05 pm EDT, Mon September 28, 2009
NVIDIA Ion accelerates Flash
NVIDIA at a recent presentation showed its Ion chipset accelerating HD video on a netbook. While the hardware can already process HD already on the system, the new demo shows YouTube's HD video smoothly with Ion's full decoding enabled where the same footage stutters when it has to rely mostly on the Atom processor. The technique works by adapting Ion to recognize and process the H.264 encoded video inside the Flash environment.
The extra support is considered essential for the further adoption of netbooks and other ultraportables, many of which often don't have significant amounts of storage to store video on their hard drives and so can't usually play any HD beyond the web.
Adobe and NVIDIA have previously said they hope to have accelerated Flash for Ion and other graphics chipsets in the first half of 2010. [via Liliputing]
