Will Geforce GTX 10xx help to increase performance of Flash Player?

[smith1323]

Hi!

In school we have e-learning swf games with interactive simulators. To run them we use latest Standalone Adobe Flash Player with enabled hardware acceleration. Recently we bought new big monitors for the classroom. Working monitors resolution is 2560x1440. Flash games size is 1600*900 px. When we run games in their original size, everything goes well. However, when we open them in full screen mode, they start to slow down notably.  It`s very important to run them in full screen, but now it`s impossible.

Processor load in Flash Player full screen and windowed mode is the same: 15-30%, physical memory available 10-11 GB of 16. No memory leaks.

Current PCs configuration: Intel Core i7-6700, 16GB RAM, video geforce gtx 970, Windows 7/10.

What can we upgrade, to solve the problem?

Will modern video card Geforce GTX 10xx help to increase performance of the Flash Player in fullscreen mode?

If you know, please help!

Thanks!

[jeromiec83223024]

My guess is that this is a problem in the content itself.  You're pushing 3.68 x 10^6 pixels at 30fps, and we're doing calculations to scale those pixels from the original size to fit your display.  If those calculations were the limiting factor, you'd see the CPU at or near 100%.  You're at 15-30%, so you're not even in the neighborhood of CPU contention.

You're also not using a lot of RAM, so memory contention is similarly unlikely.  This isn't a situation where the machine is virtualizing memory to disk and is gated by the speed of the storage hardware (which is on the order of 100,000x slower than RAM).

Would you be able to try running this content in a 64-bit browser like Chrome?  I'm pretty sure the Standalone Player (SAP) is 32-bit (it's ancient technology, kept alive primarily for developers and kiosks), so the upper memory limit on the process would be 2GB.  You might not be hitting the upper limit for the machine, but you might be running into a stupid swapping behavior because of the 32-bit memory limit.  If you can run it in a 64-bit browser, the upper memory limit is going to be a non-issue.  You might have to run a local webserver like MAMP/WAMP to do it, but it's a worthy experiment.

I think that it's more likely that the content is doing something pathological, like resizing itself every frame, forcing us to redraw the whole window instead of just the pixels that changed.  We make a profiling tool called Adobe Scout, which the content developer could use to identify hotspots in their code and optimize them accordingly.  If you were making a Flash-based desktop application today, we'd also recommend that you create it with Adobe AIR instead of depending on the projector or standalone player.

I can reason about it, but I can't tell you anything definitive without running it under a debugger.  The content provider is most likely in the best position to fix the problem.  I'm really curious about whether or not you see a benefit from a 64-bit player.

[smith1323 · Accepted solution]

I tried to use Google Chrome to play swf in their x64 embedded player.  It didn`t help, same lags appeared as it was in Standalone Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Scout also didn`t show any clues.

However, the problem was recently solved.

Nvidia Power Management caused the problem with the lags. It`s really not obvious, but somehow Nvidia driver thinks that the Graphic Card is not actually needed to play swf file , so it reduces energy supply to the Card. As a result, productivity falls.

To avoid this, go to Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Global Settings. Find Power Management Mode in the list and switch it to "Prefer Maximum Performance". That`s it. Now your modern Nvidia Graphic Card will easily play full screen swf file without lags.
By the way, there is no difference in productivity when you use Geforce GTX 10xx or older GTX 9xx. Both of them are good.