The new beta version of Flash 10 comes with hardware acceleration for 3D. This could prove to be the real advantage point Flash needs over technologies such as Silverlight.
As a C# developer and eager games developer, I’d love to see this in Silverlight. I’ve always wondered why one have been relying on software rendering in RIA technologies such as Flash and Silverlight when the graphics adapter is perfectly capable of doing this a lot better than the CPU. Let the CPU do what its good at and the graphics adapter likewise. For cross-platform compatibility one could use OpenGL as a platform for this. I guess doing that would be quite the camel to swallow for Microsoft, an abstraction of some sort would enable them to take advantage of DirectX on the Windows platform and OpenGL on Mac and Linux or any other platform. The only issue would be devices such as a Windows Mobile or a Nokia mobile telephone that wouldn’t be as powerful in 3D rendering. But I think that problem should be left to the content developer to choose how advanced graphics they want in their content.
Anyhow, the Flash 10 beta can downladed here and some samples can be found here.
One huge advantage Windows has over OSX or Linux is directX plus games using it, which keeps customers buying Windows. Adding that to a cross-platform SilverLight would very likely set many used to be Windows-only games free on OSX or Linux which woudl hurt Windows market share. Kinda ironic that Windows dominance gets in M$’ own way. In that regard, I don’t think M$ is that motivated to add handy hardware acceleration support that soon to SilverLight.
That is true, it’s a real shame though. The user experience of Silverlight would increase dramatically. In addition, there would be no excuse to hold on to two technologies if they were to implement hardware acceleration. They would be able to implement the full functionality WPF into Silverlight and actually drop WPF. Put in another perspective, Microsoft could save money by doing it, they wouldn’t need two teams maintaining two technologies that today already is almost the same. 🙂
But I guess other factors are calculated into the whole picture.
thansk with free on OSX or Linux which woudl hurt Windows market share.
Really great about this post with "Flash 10 comes with hardware accelerated 3D"
best regards,
busby
what a great discussion.
thanks for this post! i hope you can help all gamers in the world!
Nice post! very interesting topic. keep on posting.
Thanks.
With the release of the beta version of Silverlight 3 last week – I’ve started to look at how to exploit the hardware acceleration they included.
There is now support for pixelshaders in Silverlight 3, so the potential is enormous.