Adobe has released Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 today, users can download the latest updates now. The biggest feature of the release is new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics renedering (Stage 3D) which improves the rendering by 1000x times compared to the Flash Player 10 according to Adobe. This feature allows new calsses of console-quality games and apps in the flash platform. To showcase the capabilities of the Flash player 11 adobe published two sample videos, which are embedded below.
Stage 3D will be available on Windows, Mac OS and connected televisions. Support for mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and Blackberry Tablet OS will come in the future release.
Stage 3D leverages the processing power of the GPU to accelerate content for both 2D and 3D graphics. Apart from the stage 3D, new features include theatre quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high quality HD video conferencing.
According to Adobe, contetn using the new Stage 3D APIs will automatically take advantage of the GPU hardware, from graphic chipsets. Stage 3D also provides accelerated software rendering for content on older computers, but the rendering speed on these computers is only 2-10x faster than the Flash player 10.
Adobe AIR 3 can be downloaded from here, Flash Player 11 can be downloaded from here. List of Flash player features can be seen here.
Adobe announcement
