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D
dns r5
Participating Frequently
February 2, 2012
Question

pixel bender in flash - CPU v. GPU?

  • February 2, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 3672 views

i'm trying to figure out how much processing power a pixel bender filter with dynamic values (modified via flash) requires from my computer. i understand pixel bender should run on GPU and my video card (NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 on a mac) is supported.

looking at this flash video implementation http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2009/01/19/pixel-bender-effects-video-killer-runtime-effects/ i get really high CPU usage on the mac activity monitor as soon as i apply the filter. i tried using google chrome's task manager and resources seem to be drawn as badly. i tried several implementations of other filters myself, and no one had minimal CPU usage.

could anyone shed a light here? is pixel bender in flash supposed to suck so much CPU power while it's meant to be using GPU (if it's not using it already)? or maybe a 'better' way to check what's happening? funny thing is that on my tests even if CPU usage was high, the effect was still going fairly smoothly.

many thanks

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2 replies

A
Anonymous
December 11, 2013

Pixel Bender just tricked me making me all that happy and down after all.

GPU functions in the debugging environment of the desktop application of FlashBuilder, and it does not function in a release environment.

OMG...

Thank you for the temporary and short-lived happiness.

I hope it will be handled properly for the better in near future.

S
Sastradhar
Participant
December 11, 2013

From what I understand pixel bender support has been removed from flash 11.7 onwards or some one from adobe can correct me if I am wrong.

C
Carl A Looper
Participating Frequently
December 14, 2012

Somewhat disappointingly Pixelbender still does not (as far as I know) execute on the GPU, when running in Flash. Which is really quite strange when you consider that Flash can do GPU 3D animation. For some reason a 2D shader remains in the too hard basket.

But reading the marketing on Pixelbender I'm not surprised you would assume Flash ran it on the GPU. It's not until you've invested time in it that you discover it doesn't. You naturally think that Flash + Pixelbender = GPU. And nobody tells you otherwise so it's easy to jump to that conclusion. You go back over what you've read and see how they've done it. Clever use of words.

That said there are some slight benefits over Actionscript, to do with threading and background processing. Will be awesome when Flash eventually can run Pixelbender scripts on the GPU.

In Photoshop, however, Pixelbender does run on the GPU.

Carl

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 14, 2012

As a 2-facit reminder, please remember a GPU is not a CPU. They are designed for different purposes. GPU is specialized, CPU is general. While in the future filters may be coded to somehow use the GPUs shaders to accomplish things, testing first is the best solution. I wouldn't expect PixelBender to instantly update to 100% GPU usage. In fact, I'd never assume anything until tested.

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 15, 2012

Real information?

1. It is not Pixel Bender that does or does not use the GPU. It is Flash. Flash does not use the GPU. Whereas Photoshop does. Pixel Bender remains the same in both cases.

2. I'm not diagreeing with the Flash paradigm - which is why I put the word "problem" in quotes. The Flash philosophy is a good one with which I aggree. It is the misleading marketing I sometime disagree with.

3. Pixelbender3D isn't some sort of new version of Pixelbender. Pixelbender3D is designed for a different purpose, for writing shaders for use in a 3D context.

4. Indeed neither Pixel Bender nor PixelBender 3D needs to change in any way. They are already quite perfect. The future is already well planned. Its just the backend that needs catching up to the implicit plan.

C


1, Pixel Bender 2D uploads to GPU, Pixel Bender 3D does utilize the GPU.

2, Never seen marketing for Pixel Bender itself, let alone for Pixel Blender for Flash, nor misunderstood it was agnostic to the application utilizing it (to whatever extend it could, docs make it clear what those are)

3, The GPU is all about processing SIMD/vectors so, obviously yes, Pixel Bender 3D is for the GPU

4, It takes time to move huge frameworks into huge directions in a way that pleases all developers. I'll take the snotty route. If you can do it better, rather than complaining, by all means do so..

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