Lightspark 0.4.5 With New Graphics Engine Nears

Lightspark 0.4.5 is nearing release with its new graphics engine. The release candidate for Lightspark 0.4.5 just came this Saturday, boasting this new graphics engine that more heavily leverages Cairo for graphics drawing and offloading more of the workload to the graphics processor for this free software project aiming to implement the latest Adobe Flash/SWF specification. Besides faster and smoother playback (and lower CPU utilization in most cases) with this new graphics engine, this open-source Flash player also now has better input support.

The Lightspark Flash Player has progressed a lot in 2010 with many new features and milestones in catching up to Adobe's proprietary Flash Player software. Lightspark is still far from perfect and still even has problems playing some YouTube videos and other popular Flash content, but at least it's a step in the right direction with this imminent 0.4.5 release. As described previously about this new graphics code: "The new graphics path for Lightspark is expected to be faster and more powerful with a mix of hardware and software rendering with its design being inspired by modern compositing managers. Geometries will be generated using Cairo in a multi-threaded friendly manner. The resulting objects will then be offloaded to the GPU using PBOs (Pixel Buffer Objects) while OpenGL will be used to blit the rendered components on the screen and apply any filters/effects." This though is not using any Gallium3D state tracker as was previously brainstormed.

The release announcement for Lightspark 0.4.5 RC can be found on this blog post.