I'm trying to figure out the extent of flash 10's GPU acceleration capabilities. Is it possible to get 100% of your code GPU accelerated, or is only certain sandboxed functions? Even if I have to go outside the browser to get it, or to know exactly how much and what kind of GPU acceleration I can achieve inside the browser.
A link to a good article would be amazing.
See http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/what-does-gpu-acceleration-mean.html
Think of gpu being similar to what OSX and Vista do for their desktop managers, the content of windows (in flash language that means movie clips) is still rendered using software, but the result is composited using hardware. When possible we also scale video natively in the card. More and more parts of our software rasterizer might move to the GPU over the next few Flash Player versions, this is just a start.
On Windows this mode uses Direct3D, on OSX and Linux we are using OpenGL.
The hardware requirements for the GPU mode are stiff. You will need at least a DirectX 9 class card. We essentially have the exact same hardware requirements as Windows Vista with Aero Glass enabled. Aero Glass uses exact same hardware functionality we do. So if Aero Glass does not work well on your machine the Flash Player will likely not be able to run well either in GPU mode (but to clarify, you do NOT need Aero Glash for the GPU mode to work in the Flash Player, I am merely talking about hardware requirements here).
Pixel fidelity is not guaranteed when you use the GPU mode. You have to expect that content will look different on different machines, even colors might not match perfectly. This includes video. Future Flash Players will change the look of your content in this mode. We will try our best to limit the pain but please bear in mind that in many cases we have no control on this.