Question

I’m playing with Air and trying to get the PaperVision3D engine to display some 3D models.

But its really slow since Air seemingly does not support GPU acceleration. Any way to enable GPU rendering in air apps? browser apps can use “wmode=gpu” in the HTML settings…

Answer 1

I think you’ll need to wait for molehill, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/molehill/

the current hardware acceleration is pretty limited.

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http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ActionScript/3.0_ProgrammingAS3_Flex/WS2E9C7F3B-6A7C-4c5d-8ADD-5B23446FBEEB.html

there is some info at the bottom of the page there

Direct and GPU-compositing window
modes

Flash Player 10 introduces two window
modes, direct and GPU compositing,
which you can enable through the
publish settings in the Flash
authoring tool. These modes are not
supported in AIR. To take advantage of
these modes, you must enable hardware
acceleration for Flash Player.

Direct mode uses the fastest, most
direct path to push graphics to the
screen, which is advantageous for
video playback.

GPU Compositing uses the graphics
processing unit on the video card to
accelerate compositing. Video
compositing is the process of layering
multiple images to create a single
video image. When compositing is
accelerated with the GPU it can
improve the performance of YUV
conversion, color correction, rotation
or scaling, and blending. YUV
conversion refers to the color
conversion of composite analog
signals, which are used for
transmission, to the RGB (red, green,
blue) color model that video cameras
and displays use. Using the GPU to
accelerate compositing reduces the
memory and computational demands that
are otherwise placed on the CPU. It
also results in smoother playback for
standard-definition video.

Be cautious in implementing these
window modes. Using GPU compositing
can be expensive for memory and CPU
resources. If some operations (such as
blend modes, filtering, clipping or
masking) cannot be carried out in the
GPU, they are done by the software.
Adobe recommends limiting yourself to
one SWF file per HTML page when using
these modes and you should not enable
these modes for banners. The Flash
Test Movie facility does not use
hardware acceleration but you can use
it through the Publish Preview option.

Setting a frame rate in your SWF file
that is higher than 60, the maximum
screen refresh rate, is useless.
Setting the frame rate from 50 through
55 allows for dropped frames, which
can occur for various reasons from
time to time.

Using direct mode requires Microsoft
DirectX 9 with VRAM 128 MB on Windows
and OpenGL for Apple Macintosh, Mac OS
X v10.2 or higher. GPU compositing
requires Microsoft DirectX 9 and Pixel
Shader 2.0 support on Windows with 128
MB of VRAM. On Mac OS X and Linux, GPU
compositing requires OpenGL 1.5 and
several OpenGL extensions (framebuffer
object, multitexture, shader objects,
shading language, fragment shader).

You can activate direct and gpu
acceleration modes on a per-SWF basis
through the Flash Publish Settings
dialog box, using the Hardware
Acceleration menu on the Flash tab. If
you choose None, the window mode
reverts to default, transparent, or
opaque, as specified by the Window
Mode setting on the HTML tab.

Also Mike Chambers has some info somewhere about GPU acceleration (look for notes on pewpew), but I think this is all meant for mobile only.