Flash Hardware Acceleration (Overheating Issue)

[WillTheSettler]

Hey Guys,

Having had overheating issues with my Macbook Pro for several weeks using flash games such as thesettlersonline.

Specs:

2.7ghz i5

Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

I have found that turning off hardware acceleration has a direct impact on operating temperatures. To do this right click on the app that is playing and select settings, hardware acceleration is the first option.

This may be an avenue to investigate Adobe, especially with mobile graphics cards and hardware acceleration.

Cheers,

Will

Message was edited by: will (typo)

[jeromiec83223024]

If your machine is actually overheating, you have a hardware problem.  It doesn't have anything to do with Flash, beyond the fact that it consumes available CPU time on the system.

If you just don't like the fact that the fans are running in your laptop, that's another issue.  Obviously physics applies, so ventilation and the ability for the laptop chassis to dissipate heat are relevant.  Beyond that, keeping the CPU load as low as possible is going to factor into how much heat is generated by the system's hardware.

If what you're observing is that we're unable to leverage hardware acceleration on specific content, that's another issue, and there are generally a couple possible reasons:

1. There's a finite amount of GPU RAM available for content to use, and although I don't know what browser you're using, typically modern browsers are also hardware accelerated.  This means that both HTML tabs and Flash content compete for resources.  When those resources are exhausted, we can't use them.
   
   Having lots of tabs open (particularly if you have a couple active video streams) can easily mean that the GPU is already occupied when we ask for it, and we'll fall back to software rendering.  If the game plays fine as the only tab in the only open browser, but performance is poor (or CPU usage is much higher) when you launch it after opening a bunch of competing tabs, that's what you're observing.  Although the browser will allow you to open an infinite number of tabs, the system has finite resources.
   
   
2. The hardware is relatively new, and we don't have support for those drivers enabled.  That seems unlikely on Mac, but not completely out of the question.  The actual model number would be more useful in this instance.  If you copy the stuff from Apple > About This Mac > System Report > General, that would be ideal in terms of helping us find a comparable machine.
3. The browser itself might have disabled GPU features on this particular chipset.  Chrome offers great feedback from the chrome://gpu page.  The contents of that page would be interesting, if the issue is Chrome.  Other browsers don't provide great feedback on what's going on with the GPU, so it's harder to get a direct answer.

Thanks!