Adobe released Flash Player 10 beta 2 via its Adobe Labs website this week. According to one of its developers, the new mac version promises to bring up to 3 times the performance for certain operations.
If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster.
In a separate posting written before the release, he points out one text animation that achieved 8.5 frames per second (fps) before the optimization and then 28 fps afterwards in Safari.
Lastly I want to mention that the Flash Player is optimized for both x86 and PPC. It always has been. But these kind of benchmarks are really useful for us to identify platform specific bottlenecks like in this case.
There is no firm timeline for Flash Player 10's release, however the developer indicates that development is beginning to wrap up. Flash Player 10 will add a host of new features including some GPU-based processing (similar to Core Image).
