feipoa wrote:

How much RAM does Windows XP report with that much RAM? I thought 3GB or 3.2GB was the limit?
How much RAM does your BIOS report? I cannot seem to get the BIOS on any dual Tualatin board to report more than about 3.6GB

In XP it will report 4GB minus whatever is addressed for other devices; if you have a 1GB (or otherwise large) graphics card it will eat up a reasonable amount of memory for its addressing. With a 128MB card you should be able to see more like 3.5-3.7GB (assuming there's nothing amiss with the BIOS addressing that much memory). In addition to PAE hacks, another idea I've seen proposed recently was to mount the remaining memory over the 4GB barrier as a ramdisk, and just enable it all for paging file. In theory it should work as well. I can also add, anecdotally, that 2GB of memory isn't a problem in Windows Vista or Windows 7, of course as long as you don't need to run an application that requires more (like some newer games, but I'm guessing in those cases the Pentium 3 would also invalidate compatibility).

On the 4350 and HD decoding, have you tried the final Legacy 13.9 drivers? Or any of the earlier 12.x/13.x variants?

As far as getting stand-alone HD files, I vaguely remember Apple used to host movie trailers in 720p or 1080p (which were free to legally download).

luckybob:

I can tell you with confidence that those PCI-X to PCIe adapters would not let you enable SLI or CrossFire; your motherboard is not SLI or CrossFire compatible, and Pentium 3 doesn't support virtualization to enable various SLI enabler hacks (I'm not aware of any CrossFire hacks). MultiChrome might let you try enabling it (they don't have any sort of crypto lockout), but I'm guessing it'd run into issues because I doubt the translation card would let data swap between the two PCIe boards as intended (each translation card is essentially creating its own PCIe subsystem, versus on an SLI motherboard there are multiple PCIe links to the same controller). This all assumes they work flawlessly with a graphics card in the first place of course; which I don't think is guaranteed.

With heavy web browsing, I can eat up 2 GB of RAM on occasion. I've put 3 GB of RAM in my three different dual Tualatin computers and it seems sufficient for now. I will try the Catalyst 13.9 drivers and some 12.x versions before I give up on the prospect of onboard video decoding.

This website which gandhig went me seems to work provided that you use Chrome to download the files. If you use Firefox, it redirects.
http://www.hd-trailers.net/most-watched/

The offline video playback test revealed that 1080i videos are being accelerated, but only when played with Windows Media Player. GPU load is at 30% in this case as indicated by GPU-Z. I tried VLC 2.05, but no acceleration.

I have run into a setback - I cannot seem to find Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers for Windows7 and Windows does not seem to include these drivers. This is the newest sound card I have. The only other card I own from a similar era is the Aureal Vortex2, but there probably aren't drivers for this card either.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I've noticed that browser choice affects which rendering and decoding modes YouTube's Flash player uses. You can find this info […]
Show full quote

I've noticed that browser choice affects which rendering and decoding modes YouTube's Flash player uses. You can find this info by right-clicking on the video and choosing Stats For Nerds.

Chrome will use hardware rendering, but only software decoding, even with my GTX-780.

Firefox, IE, and Opera 12 use hardware rendering and decoding, but only in full screen mode. In windowed mode, they drop back to software rendering (but still use hardware decoding). I haven't tried the new webkit-based versions of Opera.

If you haven't already, you may want to try watching YouTube with Firefox or IE in full screen mode. It may boost performance to the point of being watchable.

That whole thing where Hardware Acceleration is enabled/disabled depending on whether or not you're in Windowed or Fullscreen mode is total bullshit! I'm using a Core 2 Duo E6400 with a Radeon HD 4830 on Windows 8, and watching 720p/1080p YouTube videos windowed is a complete slideshow. Why? Because hardware decoding is disabled. If I fullscreen them, hardware acceleration and hardware decoding also enable and they run smooth as silk.

IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE ON.

It has to be a driver issue of some sort because I also have a Dell running a Pentium 4 with integrated graphics on XP and it runs videos at 720p smooth as silk.

I'm wondering if people even care about this issue anymore or if their i7's are just powering through everything to make it unnoticeable.

feipoa wrote:

I will try the Catalyst 13.9 drivers and some 12.x versions before I give up on the prospect of onboard video decoding.

The offline video playback test revealed that 1080i videos are being accelerated, but only when played with Windows Media Player. GPU load is at 30% in this case as indicated by GPU-Z. I tried VLC 2.05, but no acceleration.

VLC didn't work out for me too in the case of hardware acceleration. IIRC, it works with Vista and above (DXVA 2.0 needed as per wiki). However there is good news, Media player classic - Home Cinema works great.

1. Download MPC-HC from http://mpc-hc.org/
2. Go to "View<--->Options"
3. Select "Output" and choose "VMR9 renderless/EVR custom" (WinXP/Win7 respectively) for all video formats(Quicktime, Realmedia, Directshow etc.)
4. Select "Internal Filters" and check whether all the formats have been checkmarked.
5. For GPU driver setting, please refer the attached guide from where the above steps were copied.

Guide: http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com/index.php … d=407&Itemid=38
I can't find which ATI driver they were using, but the guide was written in Nov 2009. I don't have much idea about Radeon drivers.

Since GPU acceleration works in principle for offline playback, maybe flash will work too(no guarantee, however). Whether the decoding & rendering are shown as 'accelerated' in full-screen?

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb.

For example, I like to watch Twitch.tv and YouTube. This is my setup:

Core 2 Duo E6400
Radeon HD 4830
3GB DDR2 667
Windows 8.1 Pro

The Radeon HD 4830 is no longer eligible for AMD's driver updates so I have to use the legacy version 8.97 that is MS approved.

I prefer to use Firefox. When I watch YouTube HD videos in windowed mode, they will be choppy if Flash's "Hardware Acceleration" is enabled, this is because in Firefox the Flash videos in Windowed mode aren't accelerated. When I fullscreen it, hardware acceleration and decoding are enabled and it runs smooth as silk. When I watch Twitch.tv though, its choppy because Hardware Acceleration is enabled. So I have to disable Hardware Acceleration if I want Twitch.tv's videos to run smooth and enable it if I want to watch YouTube videos full screen smooth.

The whole thing is just a mess, because as mentioned in someone else's post the different browsers will enable/disable acceleration and decoding at different points.

fyy wrote:

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb.
I prefer to use Firefox. When I watch YouTube HD videos in windowed mode, they will be choppy if Flash's "Hardware Acceleration" is enabled, this is because in Firefox the Flash videos in Windowed mode aren't accelerated. When I fullscreen it, hardware acceleration and decoding are enabled and it runs smooth as silk. When I watch Twitch.tv though, its choppy because Hardware Acceleration is enabled. So I have to disable Hardware Acceleration if I want Twitch.tv's videos to run smooth and enable it if I want to watch YouTube videos full screen smooth.
The whole thing is just a mess, because as mentioned in someone else's post the different browsers will enable/disable acceleration and decoding at different points.

Yeah, it is completely dumb. Surprisingly under Linux, there is no such problem. Both decoding and rendering stays accelerated irrespective of 'windowed' or 'full screen' modes. I also don't understand why only Youtube videos get accelerated and the other flash websites don't, probably it has to do with the differences in the video encoding formats. Similar situation for HTML5 playback too.

fyy, how are you enabling/disabling hardware acceleration?

gandhib, I will look into that other video player a little later. I will be a grease monkey for a few days while I get my [vintage] 1979 Mercedes up and running. Were you able to get Youtube videos which use the HTML5 player to accelerate, or only Flash? I've noticed that if you use Chrome, Youtube videos are now played with HTML5, whereas if you use Firefox, they still use Flash.

feipoa wrote:

fyy, how are you enabling/disabling hardware acceleration?

gandhib, I will look into that other video player a little later. I will be a grease monkey for a few days while I get my [vintage] 1979 Mercedes up and running. Were you able to get Youtube videos which use the HTML5 player to accelerate, or only Flash? I've noticed that if you use Chrome, Youtube videos are now played with HTML5, whereas if you use Firefox, they still use Flash.

Right Click Menu, then Settings, check/uncheck 'Hardware Acceleration'.

Don't bother with MPC-HC as you have already got it with WMP. I was able to get hardware acceleration in full screen only for Youtube videos under certain conditions. Don't know whether it pertains only to Nvidia or that it can be extended to AMD GPU's too.
Method:
1) Immediately switched to full screen.
2) Paused(not necessarily required). I had to do this because of the poor internet speed.
3) Selected 240p resolution and let it buffer and then played it.
4) Waited till the 'video fps' stabilized at around 25 FPS and changed the resolution to 1080p
5) After a slight initial hiccup and some dropped frames probably due to switch to proper 'Full screen' (without any controls and mouse), I got the above result. The dropped frames were counted after the above initial hiccup which normally ran in many tens of frames.(Please check my thread for complete details)
HTML5 - no go under both Windows & Linux (Firefox only) as it showed that webm format videos are not supported with hardware acceleration. Chromium did show that it supported under Linux, but the flash acceleration was patchy in general. Didn't meddle with Chrome in windows much.

feipoa wrote:

With heavy web browsing, I can eat up 2 GB of RAM on occasion. I've put 3 GB of RAM in my three different dual Tualatin compute […]
Show full quote

With heavy web browsing, I can eat up 2 GB of RAM on occasion. I've put 3 GB of RAM in my three different dual Tualatin computers and it seems sufficient for now. I will try the Catalyst 13.9 drivers and some 12.x versions before I give up on the prospect of onboard video decoding.

This website which gandhig went me seems to work provided that you use Chrome to download the files. If you use Firefox, it redirects.
http://www.hd-trailers.net/most-watched/

The offline video playback test revealed that 1080i videos are being accelerated, but only when played with Windows Media Player. GPU load is at 30% in this case as indicated by GPU-Z. I tried VLC 2.05, but no acceleration.

I have run into a setback - I cannot seem to find Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers for Windows7 and Windows does not seem to include these drivers. This is the newest sound card I have. The only other card I own from a similar era is the Aureal Vortex2, but there probably aren't drivers for this card either.

You really must do some heavy browsing. 😲

Good that you found some trailers - that was the only thing I could think of that's legal and not huge files. 😊

With VLC it may require a plug-in or some custom configuration or some such; as has been already said Windows Media Player or MPC are easier options. 😀

As far as SB Live! I don't think there are WDDM audio drivers for it - I'd say it's time to upgrade to an Audigy or similar-era C-Media card.

fyy wrote:

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb. […]
Show full quote

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb.

For example, I like to watch Twitch.tv and YouTube. This is my setup:

Core 2 Duo E6400
Radeon HD 4830
3GB DDR2 667
Windows 8.1 Pro

The Radeon HD 4830 is no longer eligible for AMD's driver updates so I have to use the legacy version 8.97 that is MS approved.

I prefer to use Firefox. When I watch YouTube HD videos in windowed mode, they will be choppy if Flash's "Hardware Acceleration" is enabled, this is because in Firefox the Flash videos in Windowed mode aren't accelerated. When I fullscreen it, hardware acceleration and decoding are enabled and it runs smooth as silk. When I watch Twitch.tv though, its choppy because Hardware Acceleration is enabled. So I have to disable Hardware Acceleration if I want Twitch.tv's videos to run smooth and enable it if I want to watch YouTube videos full screen smooth.

The whole thing is just a mess, because as mentioned in someone else's post the different browsers will enable/disable acceleration and decoding at different points.

That system should have no problems with HD video whatsoever (even without the 4830); I just opened up a random 1080p video on YT on my C2D under IE (it's running while I'm typing this) - windowed or FS I'm seeing low CPU load (5-10% CPU time) but windowed is certainly "more" demanding (makes sense - it has to scale the video down), and 30-45% GPU video engine load on the graphics card (Quadro FX 1700 - it's basically a fancy GeForce 8600). It's running smooth in all cases. Back when I did HD-DVD on PC, there was no difference between full-screen and windowed with an HD 4870 - in both cases it was fully GPU accelerated within the Corel player, and even scaling to >1080p was no problem (low CPU/GPU load all around).

As far as the AMD card - AMD moved the HD 4000 series to legacy support around 2012 (in keeping with their horrible policy on legacy support); the latest WHQL Catalyst release for Windows 8 is 13.1; the latest overall release is 13.4 Beta. I'd try downloading and installing either of those from the AMD website for the card - I've never had good luck with the base drivers that Windows Update installs for AMD cards (usually there's performance/support issues, I think mostly because Windows Update doesn't install the complete Catalyst package).

feipoa wrote:

I have run into a setback - I cannot seem to find Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers for Windows7 and Windows does not seem to include these drivers. This is the newest sound card I have. The only other card I own from a similar era is the Aureal Vortex2, but there probably aren't drivers for this card either.

http://www.kxproject.com/

There is also a "SB Live Support Pack" for Windows 7 by DanielK based on Creative's drivers, but those will not work on machines with more than 2GB of RAM. The kxproject drivers work fine under Windows 7 with 2+GB of RAM.

obobskivich wrote:

fyy wrote:

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb. […]
Show full quote

The whole thing with relation to Flash and hardware/software decoding is really dumb.

For example, I like to watch Twitch.tv and YouTube. This is my setup:

Core 2 Duo E6400
Radeon HD 4830
3GB DDR2 667
Windows 8.1 Pro

The Radeon HD 4830 is no longer eligible for AMD's driver updates so I have to use the legacy version 8.97 that is MS approved.

I prefer to use Firefox. When I watch YouTube HD videos in windowed mode, they will be choppy if Flash's "Hardware Acceleration" is enabled, this is because in Firefox the Flash videos in Windowed mode aren't accelerated. When I fullscreen it, hardware acceleration and decoding are enabled and it runs smooth as silk. When I watch Twitch.tv though, its choppy because Hardware Acceleration is enabled. So I have to disable Hardware Acceleration if I want Twitch.tv's videos to run smooth and enable it if I want to watch YouTube videos full screen smooth.

The whole thing is just a mess, because as mentioned in someone else's post the different browsers will enable/disable acceleration and decoding at different points.

That system should have no problems with HD video whatsoever (even without the 4830); I just opened up a random 1080p video on YT on my C2D under IE (it's running while I'm typing this) - windowed or FS I'm seeing low CPU load (5-10% CPU time) but windowed is certainly "more" demanding (makes sense - it has to scale the video down), and 30-45% GPU video engine load on the graphics card (Quadro FX 1700 - it's basically a fancy GeForce 8600). It's running smooth in all cases. Back when I did HD-DVD on PC, there was no difference between full-screen and windowed with an HD 4870 - in both cases it was fully GPU accelerated within the Corel player, and even scaling to >1080p was no problem (low CPU/GPU load all around).

As far as the AMD card - AMD moved the HD 4000 series to legacy support around 2012 (in keeping with their horrible policy on legacy support); the latest WHQL Catalyst release for Windows 8 is 13.1; the latest overall release is 13.4 Beta. I'd try downloading and installing either of those from the AMD website for the card - I've never had good luck with the base drivers that Windows Update installs for AMD cards (usually there's performance/support issues, I think mostly because Windows Update doesn't install the complete Catalyst package).

Have you tried doing it in Firefox?

Windows 8.1 will fight you the entire way if you're trying to install anything that isn't the legacy 13.1 drivers on an older card. I used to be able to do it in Windows 8 through some stupid method, but it no longer works in Windows 8.1. Even if I uninstall it through device manager and try to install Catalyst, it will give me an error.

What's funny is that going from 8 to 8.1, I HAD a non-Windows Update driver, but after 8.1 completed, it reverted me back to the old driver. Also, this old driver is the ONLY one that works with metro apps like Netflix - it's a DRM issue of some sort.

I'm thinking about just putting XP or 7 back on this guy and using my 8 license when I get a newer card.

I don't use Firefox, so no. Do things work for you in Internet Explorer? I'd say if things work under IE, it's a Firefox issue, not a Microsoft/AMD issue.

As far as 8.1 - are you using a 64-bit version of the OS? Or did you upgrade to such from Windows 8? That'd be the only "DRM issue" that comes to mind (64-bit Windows generally requires signed drivers, and 13.1 is the latest WHQL build for Windows 8 (even though there's a 13.9 WHQL for Windows 7)).

obobskivich wrote:

I don't use Firefox, so no. Do things work for you in Internet Explorer? I'd say if things work under IE, it's a Firefox issue, not a Microsoft/AMD issue.

As far as 8.1 - are you using a 64-bit version of the OS? Or did you upgrade to such from Windows 8? That'd be the only "DRM issue" that comes to mind (64-bit Windows generally requires signed drivers, and 13.1 is the latest WHQL build for Windows 8 (even though there's a 13.9 WHQL for Windows 7)).

I upgraded to 8.1 from a 64-bit Windows 8 fresh install. The Radeon HD 4800 series falls into the "legacy" category for AMD now in their driver distribution. I'm stuck with the 13.1 drivers. Even under AMD's driver selection menu, there is no "Windows 8.1" when you select HD 4XXX series. There is "Windows 8" and that's it. If you select any newer cards a new menu for "Windows 8.1 64-bit" pops up with the latest drivers (14.4 apparently).

So my card is no longer getting driver updates, and even when I was able to force it to install other drivers in the original Windows 8, that would break all the DRM related apps in the metro menu. Performance would be a lot better in certain applications, but the metro Netflix app would load and stop at 97% every single time - which sites were reporting as a DRM issue.

Internet Explorer in Windows 8 feels much more snappy than Firefox, but the Pentium 4 in the other room on XP runs Firefox and HD videos through flash much better. The Pentium 4's Windowed mode flash performance is flawless, whereas on this system even though its much more powerful is slogging through the same stuff. There's some sort of compatibility issue going on with this system relating to the drivers, Windows 8 and flash.

That KX audio driver does work for Sound Blaster Live in Windows 7. Thank you for the suggestion. It is a bit non-intuitive though and sometimes stopped functioning for me, which was fixed by a reboot. Better than nothing though.

My HD4350 does get some GPU load at around 12% when playing windowed Flash videos in Firefox/IE, the combined yield of the processors is around 50%. On the other hand, my other dual PIII with Parhelia graphics card also got around 50% CPU yield watching the same Youtube video. I might need to compare full screen mode with both systems to visually determine if there is really any acceleration taking place. I do not see any graphic card settings to disable acceleration directly.

Videos utilising HTML5 in Chrome are slow and do not indicate any GPU load.

I can confirm there should be no problem with a Core 2 Duo playing HD video.
I was able to play 720p youtube video on my C2D E6700 and Radeon 6670 with the CPU downclocked to 2100MHz with
only 50% CPU usage. This is in windowed mode with ff24

feipoa wrote:

My HD4350 does get some GPU load at around 12% when playing windowed Flash videos in Firefox/IE, the combined yield of the processors is around 50%. On the other hand, my other dual PIII with Parhelia graphics card also got around 50% CPU yield watching the same Youtube video. I might need to compare full screen mode with both systems to visually determine if there is really any acceleration taking place. I do not see any graphic card settings to disable acceleration directly.

Videos utilising HTML5 in Chrome are slow and do not indicate any GPU load.

I really doubt that your GPU load of 12% is indicative of hardware acceleration, maybe only the rendering and not the decoding. Maybe some expert can confirm that. You have rightly pointed out the combined load on the two processors as 50% on an average, so what is the individual load separately on the two processors. If my understanding is right, you will see one processor getting loaded close to 100% and the other one close to Nil for a combined average of 50%.

I guess even in smeezekitty's case too, if the 50% load is indicative of the average, then one out of the two cores must be heavily loaded close to 90% and the other one loaded lightly. I have seen online flash playback (windowed) on my friends' C2D system exhibiting such behaviour with a little bit of multitasking. Here too there must not be any hardware acceleration taking place as the 50% load is too high for a powerful processor like C2D, however I may be wrong.

Hence if the flash video playback makes use of a single processor only and there is no hardware acceleration triggered by it to use the GPU in windowed mode, then I guess we won't be seeing glorious HD flash videos in older systems. Full screen however normally should not be a problem, but as I said earlier the triggering of hardware acceleration was not automatic in my case under full screen. It was done manually after I stumbled upon it.

How about disabling the directx components from dxdiag as mentioned in this funny post http://superuser.com/questions/441321/disable … l-have-direct3d
Another option to disable seems to be from Display properties -->Settings-->Troubleshoot-->Advanced-->Hardware acceleration (Slider from none to full)

Regarding html5 I'm just curious, what formats does your browser show 'supported' when you open http://www.youtube.com/html5

Ok I can confirm it is definitely (software) video rendering that is hard on the CPU here.

Playing a 720P video in Windowed mode with the large player:
Software video rendering, accelerated video decoding
With the video visible CPU=25-50% GPU=1-10%
With the video offscreen CPU=5-12% GPU=0-1%

Playing a 720P video full screen:
Accelerated video rendering, accelerated video decoding
CPU=4-15% (!) GPU=4-20%

One thing I observed is flash fideo playback stutters on single core CPUs when doing something such as scroll or switch tabs.
For example on a 3.4GHz P4 it will stutter and on a 1.8GHz C2D it will not

smeezekitty wrote:

One thing I observed is flash fideo playback stutters on single core CPUs when doing something such as scroll or switch tabs.
For example on a 3.4GHz P4 it will stutter and on a 1.8GHz C2D it will not

As the anomaly rears its ugly head, this brings us to the fundamental question.
Does the casually/normally recommended (not minimum) system requirements for flash, i.e.a modern processor like C2D, is not because flash can make use of the multi-cores but only because the other core can take care of the other tasks/services while multitasking (even moving a mouse) as the first core is mainly used by flash plugin. I maybe wrong as the minimum requirements mention a under 2 Ghz atom, maybe it is the modern architecture.
Can you tell us the load distribution among all of the cores during the different cases mentioned above?

fyy wrote:

I upgraded to 8.1 from a 64-bit Windows 8 fresh install. The Radeon HD 4800 series falls into the "legacy" category for AMD now in their driver distribution. I'm stuck with the 13.1 drivers. Even under AMD's driver selection menu, there is no "Windows 8.1" when you select HD 4XXX series. There is "Windows 8" and that's it. If you select any newer cards a new menu for "Windows 8.1 64-bit" pops up with the latest drivers (14.4 apparently).

So my card is no longer getting driver updates, and even when I was able to force it to install other drivers in the original Windows 8, that would break all the DRM related apps in the metro menu. Performance would be a lot better in certain applications, but the metro Netflix app would load and stop at 97% every single time - which sites were reporting as a DRM issue.

Internet Explorer in Windows 8 feels much more snappy than Firefox, but the Pentium 4 in the other room on XP runs Firefox and HD videos through flash much better. The Pentium 4's Windowed mode flash performance is flawless, whereas on this system even though its much more powerful is slogging through the same stuff. There's some sort of compatibility issue going on with this system relating to the drivers, Windows 8 and flash.

As I said, AMD "abandoned" the HD 4800 series around 2011-2012; I wasn't aware they'd completely botched 8.1 support though. Sounds like it's time for a new graphics card... 😒 (honestly I ditched AMD a few months ago over the same kind of thing - I don't like their policy of abandoning products within a few years and leaving users out in the cold, and I'm much happier to deal with Matrox/nVidia/Intel who provide 5-10 years of driver support for anything they release).

gandhig wrote:

I really doubt that your GPU load of 12% is indicative of hardware acceleration, maybe only the rendering and not the decoding. Maybe some expert can confirm that. You have rightly pointed out the combined load on the two processors as 50% on an average, so what is the individual load separately on the two processors. If my understanding is right, you will see one processor getting loaded close to 100% and the other one close to Nil for a combined average of 50%.

Actually that 12% load is probably dead-on; decoding/acceleration video playback is "nothing" to a modern USM GPU (consider the floating point power of a USM GPU - decoding of a 2-4Mbit 720p stream is relatively nothing). ATi cards, if I remember right, tend not to report "video engine load" like nVidia cards will, so you're just seeing a raw average of the card's loading (especially if you're going from CCC, which only reports "GPU Load" as an averaged stat - it isn't showing the break-down between MEMIO, Shaders, etc).

I guess even in smeezekitty's case too, if the 50% load is indicative of the average, then one out of the two cores must be heavily loaded close to 90% and the other one loaded lightly. I have seen online flash playback (windowed) on my friends' C2D system exhibiting such behaviour with a little bit of multitasking. Here too there must not be any hardware acceleration taking place as the 50% load is too high for a powerful processor like C2D, however I may be wrong.

Depends on the stream, the source, etc. Something that isn't being mentioned at all here is that resolution != bitrate. YT is fairly heavily compressed to make it accessible to a lot of clients and save bandwidth costs on Google's end. 1080p from an HD-DVD or Blu-ray is substantially higher bitrate, and will eat up more bandwidth, memory, etc to deal with; it isn't the "same thing" despite all being "1080p". (to make a gaming analogy: Quake 3 and Quake 4 both run at 1600x1200 don't present the same level of load to the system, despite both being run at 1600x1200).

Something else that isn't being mentioned is that not all "video decode acceleration" is created equal - in some cases the GPU is only providing partial acceleration; GeForce 7 and (if I remember right) the early Intel GMA hardware fits into that category. Newer cards (like nVidia G80) do more work onboard. Driver/application support is also a big contributor to how well the task is handled (different browsers, configs, etc can make a big difference here).

Adobe just prompted me to download Flash 14, and--minor miracle here--it actually seems to be a bit faster than Flash 13. This reminds me of Flash 11, which outperformed Flash 10.2. I just did a quick "benchmark" on three older systems. All running Win7 and Firefox 29. Sorry, I don't have any Flash 13 CPU usage results, but I do remember them being a bit higher.

Laptop - Core 2 Duo T5600 (1.83GHz, 667FSB) - Intel i945 (GMA950) graphics. The IGP helps with rendering, but the CPU has to do all of the decode.

360p Windowed - 8-18%
360p Full screen - 2-10%

720p Windowed - 30-55%
720p Full screen - 21-42%

1080p Windowed - 100% (bad frame droppage)
1080p Full screen - 90-100% (still drops frames, but not as many)

"PM on Desktop" rig - Pentium M 755 overclocked to 2.66GHz - GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. Keep in mind the Pentium M is a single core CPU, but the GPU does a fantastic job of offloading decode.

360p windowed - 4-14%
360p full screen - 1-8%

720p windowed - 17-32%
720p full screen - 6-19%

1080p windowed - 38-55%
1080p full screen - 10-28%

"Basement HTPC" - Opteron 185 (dual core s939) overclocked to 3GHz - GeForce 8800GTS (G80). Keep in mind the G80 version of 8800GTS does not have a hardware H.264 decoder, so the CPU has to do all of the decoding. I probably could've lowered CPU usage by disabling SLI. Shucks.

360p windowed - 5-12%
360p full screen - 2-9%

720p windowed - 21-43%
720p full screen - 14-35%

1080p windowed - 72-97% (occasional frame drop)
1080p full screen - 62-88% (smooth)

So...yeah. Go ahead and download Flash 14. It actually sucks a bit less!