You said that it's specific to PPAPI, but you describe the same symptoms across both the ActiveX (IE) and NPAPI (Firefox) as well. I've updated the subject (and branched this to it's own thread) so that it more accurately describes what's going on.
If you're seeing really high CPU usage when playing video, it's because we're not able to take advantage of the GPU on your machine. If it's a super new chipset, we might not have enabled support for it yet. Since your machine is brand new, my guess is that's what is happening here.
The contents of the DirectX diagnostic tool would be useful in identifying the hardware and drivers involved, at which point I can try to chase that down.
To get the output of dxdiag, do the following:
Go to Start > Run and type
dxdiag
Hit Enter
The DirectX diagnostic tool should launch
Choose Save All Information and paste the output into a reply here (or provide a pastebin/dropbox/etc link, whatever is most convenient for you).
Also, what version of Windows are you on? I'm guessing Win8.1, but we don't require hardware to be whitelisted there, so it *should* just work. If it's Win7, then we probably just need to whitelist the card.
As far as RAM goes, there's a trade-off between performance and memory usage, so Flash Player will consume a percentage of RAM based on the available system resources, which it uses to pre-cache various images and texture assets, buffer streams, etc. If you have a lot of available RAM, Flash will use more memory than it would on a system that was resource-constrained. Each tab consumes resources, so if you're running 20 tabs simultaneously, you can get some serious resource consumption. High-end 3D games require a lot of textures and asset caching for good performance (it's basically doing what a desktop game would), so you'll see some big resource consumption values there as well.
There are also common content problems, the big one that we're talking about at the moment is one where video providers will create new video objects for inserted commercials but will never delete them, such that the commercials will continue to eat up available RAM and cannot be garbage-collected by Flash Player's memory management because they're marked as still in-use. This happens on some really high-profile streaming sites. While it's not a Flash bug per-se, it's a fairly widespread mistake and we're looking at methods for minimizing the impact of that type of design problem. If you've noticed Flash crashing after a couple hours of watching TV shows, that's usually what's going on. We're trying to figure out an elegant way to keep that use-case constrained without breaking the web, which is always an interesting problem.
So, the symptoms that I think are really relevant here are primarily the A/V sync and choppy playback, which is probably a product of CPU contention. You can confirm by firing up a Flash video. If CPU is in the 2-3% range, you're in hardware, otherwise you're in CPU. The CPU contention is happening because we're doing all of the video decoding and rendering in software (using the CPU), instead of using the GPU for this task, which is what is really necessary for decent performance, particularly with high-definition video. You can only do a finite number of things on the GPU before you exhaust the available memory, at which point we'll fall back to CPU for other stuff. So running a complex 3D game and a high-definition video in simultaneous tabs/windows may mean that one or more of them is falling back to CPU. So even when GPU is supported normally, now that the browsers are also GPU-accelerated, there's that many more things competing for GPU resources, and running multiple browsers or a ton of tabs will have a big performance impact once you exhaust the available GPU resources and things start falling back to software.
Anyway, looking forward to the dxdiag report. That's really the next step here. I know we have at least one card in the pipeline, so I'm curious to know if this is something we know about already and will support in an upcoming release, or something that we didn't get advanced warning about and that we need to accommodate.
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