Paul - The Programmer

simple & stupid

Enable Adobe Flash Player GPU acceleration on Linux

Flash Player uses the OpenGL to support GPU acceleration on Linux.

This feature requires the below features from the OpenGL facilities.

  • GL_ARB_multitexture
  • GL_EXT_framebuffer_object
  • GL_ARB_shader_objects
  • GL_ARB_shading_language_100
  • GL_ARB_fragment_shader

Flash player automatically checks the video card and driver combination meet the GPU compositing requirement.

However we can ask the Flash player to skip the GPU valiadation by define option OverrideGPUValidation in mms.cfg.

The mms.cfg is a system wild configuration file for policy setting. For Linux, mms.cfg has to be created with the path /etc/adobe.

So, what I need to do to enable the GPU acceleration is :

  1. Create file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg.
  2. Add  "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" ( without the quotes ) in mms.cfg. 1 is for true, 0 is for false.

Unfortunately, this trick does not work for my ATI X300 card. I didn't notice any improvement. The flash played in a little window still make CPU run over 70%.

After checked with glxinfo, I found only the GL_ARB_multitexture. All the other needed OpenGL features are missing. I thought that is the root cause.

By the way, the option OverrideGPUValidation may need Flash rendering problems or even system crash. You should use it with care.