Console-Quality Flash Gaming In 12 Months Says AMD

Flash may have fallen out of favor in recent years, but AMD is betting on a resurgence of the technology with the prediction that Flash games will equal their console counterparts in quality within the twelve months. The chip manufacturer made the ambitious prediction at the launch of the new AMD Trinity, the company's latest APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) that delivers, among other things, hardware-accelerated Flash support.

It's that hardware support for Adobe's little-loved technology that AMD believes will make all the difference to gamers. Currently, Flash titles are generally more along the lines of casual games, with anything more graphically intense or complex bogging down on all but the most powerful of PCs.

Trinity promises to change all that, with its second-gen APU architecture delivering twice the performance per Watt of last-gen Llano chips. That means regular games play faster too, and with more graphical details: Crysis 3, for instance, is supposedly 1.4x faster on Trinity than on the corresponding Intel Ivy Bridge processor.

Of course, AMD can add all the hardware support it likes, but it's dependent on software developers to actually push the limits of Flash gaming. The processor company is hedging its bets, though; Trinity also supports hardware acceleration for HTML5.