Earlier this week, I started reading into Pixel Bender and did some nice tutorials for both creating pbj files and importing them into Flash. With this set up, the pbj is loaded at run time creating another type of external asset to manage. Mike Chambers posted a solution for this that allows pbjs to be embedded within a swf. Once I got everything up and working, I noticed swfs using Pixel Bender filters ran incredibly slow. This was disappointing since I was under the impression it was hardware accelerated. Using a PowerPC based Mac, I had a feeling Flash 10 only supported GPU calculations on Intel machines, and with a little research, it was confirmed.

As impressed as I am with the speed inside the Pixel Bender toolkit, the performance within the player creates two distinct audiences that contradicts the ubiquity for which Flash is known. Adobe engineer, Tinic Uro claims adding support for additional graphic cards would increase file size for the player and thus, the reason they were not included. Personally, I have no problem waiting for an extra 2mb if it means a 10x performance boost. As it stands, I don’t think Pixel Bender is ready to be considered for commercial applications without alienating large portions of the audience.

Considering Flash 10 isn’t out yet, perhaps Adobe will make support more available in the up and coming months. Hopefully, this is not an attempt to simply match Microsoft stride for stride in RIA features while compromising the platform’s universality.