Adobe today announced Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 with 3D support, a revamp the company said will boost the gaming experience.
The updates, which will launch in October, include rendering performance that is 1,000 times faster than its predecessors. That performance boost is made possible via something known as Stage 3D, which "enables content that efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second," Adobe's Tom Nguyen wrote in a blog post.
The upgrades, he said, will also allow for "theater-quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high-quality HD video conferencing, and a powerful, flexible architecture for leveraging native device and platform capabilities."
Adobe touted the improvements Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 will provide gamers, bundling its announcements with glowing comments from Zynga, EA, Ubisoft, and more.
"Flash Player 11 and Air 3 allow game publishers to instantly deliver engaging games to anyone with a PC, tablet, smartphone, or connected TV," Nguyen wrote. "And with Stage 3D, game publishers and developers can take their games to a new level, creating new opportunities for game developers and publishers to deliver and monetize their content."
Adobe said Stage 3D will be available for smartphones and tablets as a private prerelease. "The efficient Stage 3D architecture was designed from the ground up with resource-constrained mobile devices in mind," he said.
The company also championed Starling, a framework for 2D graphics and animation that combine Flash and Stage 3D.
Other updates coming to Flash Player 11 and Air 3 include: full native 64-bit support for 64-bit browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows; native Air 3 extensions that let developers take advantage of existing native code libraries and deep native hardware and OS capabilities like sensors, multiple screens, native in-app payments, haptic/vibration control, device status, and NFC; and simple installation.
Expect more details at the Adobe MAX conference, which runs from October 1-5 in Los Angeles.
The releases come about a week after Microsoft said the Metro-style version of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 will not support plugins, meaning it will not support Adobe Flash.
If you use the desktop version of IE10, plugin support will remain, but Dean Hachamovitch, head of Microsoft's IE team, said "the experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 Web."
In a statement, Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of Platform at Adobe, stressed that the Windows 8 desktop "will support Flash just fine, including rich web based games and premium videos that require Flash."
Flash-based apps, meanwhile, will be available for Metro via Adobe AIR, he said.
"Adobe is about enabling content publishers and developers to deliver the richest experiences for their users, independent of technology, including HTML5 and Flash," Winokur said at the time. "We are working closely with Microsoft, Google, Apple and others in the HTML community to drive innovation in HTML5, to make it as rich as possible for delivering world-class content on the open Web and through App Stores."