By now you've probably heard and seen the news from MAX. Custom filters, fills and blend modes using the Adobe Imaging Framework and coded with Hydra. Nice. But... Why not go further? AIF certainly makes use of the GPU to very quickly manipulate bitmap graphics by passing in one or two images to the graphics card and a compiled hydra-script which instructs the GPU to basically create a pixel shader and apply that to a textured rectangle.
Now it seems that the good stuff ends there. While fast image manipulation (and we're talking realtime fullscreen image manipulation as opposed to Flash 8's slow software filters) certainly is cool, why not go all the way? I wold guess that only the image manipulation is done on the GPU and that the Flash Player then retrieves the rendered texture from the GPU to pass it back to the Flash Players software rendering pipeline. I would have really loved to see all (or most) rendering taking place on the GPU.
Tinic, how about one of your great technical posts on this subject?
