AMD/ATI Accelerating GPU Flash Player 10.1 Too

That Radeon HD 5800 series card will be VERY good at making Flash go.

Yesterday when Adobe announced its Flash Player 10.1 that'll be coming down the pipe, Nvidia was among the first to chime in saying that its GPUs will be able to accelerate Flash video with GeForce and Ion.

AMD's informed us that it plans to support Adobe Flash Player 10.1 at the same level and in step with the beta release later this year.

"AMD is committed to making the video usage scenario -- playback, editing and transcoding -- a focal point for AMD platform innovation, smartly using the full CPU + GPU assets of our platform to enrich and accelerate the experience," an AMD representative told us.

In fact, at the Adobe MAX event in Los Angeles, Adobe demonstrated a private alpha of Flash Player 10.1 that is supported by the ATI Radeon HD 5800 (the only GPU on the market right now to fully support DirectX 11).

Both Adobe and AMD worked with the DirectX 11 API's compute shader and ATI Stream technology to accelerate Flash performance with the GPU.

Hooray for the growing utility of the GPU beyond just playing 3D games!