With Flash 9, Adobe introduced streaming high definition video playback to its Flash empire, just so long as users' systems had the power to play it. After many demands for better performance on low-power computers, like HTPCs and netbooks, Adobe aims to please with their impending release of Flash 10.1. In this article, we put Adobe's claims of higher performance to the test with video and gaming benchmarks.

It's easy to see in the chart above what an incredible difference Flash 10.1 makes! With Flash 10.0, SD played smoothly, while 720P lost a barely noticeable number of frames and 1080P played terribly, bogging down the entire computer so much that Internet Explorer locked up and the process had to be killed in Task Manager. Firefox had a similar locking result, though it did eventually respond on its own. A credit to Google's Chrome sandboxing approach, closing out the browser was immediate even if the video playback was the worst...