Can changing SWF version improve performance?

[thx1138]

Are there performance improvements in each new Flash Player? And if so do you have to set the swf-version to an updated value?

[User_Unknow · Accepted solution]

Updating of Flash Player plugin you will get performance improvements. But if you change only Publish version - this will not affect on performance. Limiting publish version affects only feature availability.

So if you publish your swf for 10.3 player but you will have 11.7 plugin - you will get performance of 11.7 plugin.

But if your computer have on a board old plugin (10.3 for example) - you will get only 10.3 performance. Also you can't get newest features.

[jeromiec83223024]

In Flash Player, SWF versioning is primarily a mechansim for maintaining backwards compatiblity. 

New features are tied to the version where they're introduced, but the important distinction is that we offer bug-for-bug backwards compatibility, with security as an exception. 

If we encounter an API that works incorrectly in previous versions and the fix is likely to break existing content, we'll version-check the fix and apply it to only versions equal or greater to the SWF version where it's introduced.

I can't think of a good example where we've version-checked a performance fix off the top of my head, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

TLDR; You'll probably want to publish to the highest SWF version unless you have a good reason not to, especially now that background update is widely deployed.