The newly-released Adobe Flash Player for Mac supports GPU decoding of H.264 video only for some Mac models

Adobe this week stealth-released a version of Flash Player for Mac that supports GPU decoding of H.264-encoded video. However, the “cool” feature only works on Macs with certain NVIDIA graphics cards. The culprit: Blame Apple for the spotty coverage.

Adobe product manager Thibault Imbert said on the ByteArray.org blog that Flash Player 10.1.82.76 , a security update, enabled the feature that offloads decoding to the GPU hardware.

We just pushed a few minutes ago a new version of the Flash Player 10.1.82.76 containing a nice feature that was in beta until now called “Gala”. Yes, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player.
You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature.

However, followup posts from readers revealed that only some Macs are supported in this initial release of Flash Player. The feature requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard and a Mac with a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M GPU.

It appears that the Player update uses Apple’s Video Decode Acceleration framework, which is an API that offers “low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs.”