What is hardware acceleration and how to enable it

In 2011, Adobe released Flash Player 11, which supports hardware acceleration. Before that, all calculations were made using CPU, so developers had to cope with limitations on number of polygons, etc. Tanki Online was developed using Alternativa3D 7 for Flash Player 10 and the average FPS was around 20-25. In order to boost graphics it, was decided to add support for Flash Player 11 to the game.
Adobe published a list of GPUs that currently do NOT support hardware acceleration.
Until recently there was no support for this function in Linux, so there was no extra gain in FPS. However, it is now possible to use hardware acceleration in Google Chrome thanks to PPAPI Flash Player.


Enabling Flash Hardware acceleration~

  • Update Flash player to 11.x. version. Use the link
  • Update your GPU's drivers.
  • Load in a Tanki server. Then, right-click with your mouse and select 'Settings'.
  • On the Settings screen, go to the first section, then put a tick next to 'Enable hardware acceleration'
  • After you've done this, close the Settings menu and restart your browse

Disabling Flash Hardware acceleration~

If after enabling acceleration, you can no longer join battles due to the map not loading, you will need to once again disable hardware acceleration.

  • To disable hardware acceleration, you have to load in a Tanki server. Then, right-click with your mouse and select 'Settings'.
  • On the Settings screen, go to the first section, then remove the tick from 'Enable hardware acceleration'.
  • When you have done this, close the Settings menu and restart your browser.

Fine-tuning of your GPU~

  • If you don't like the image quality after enabling Hardware acceleration, you can experiment with different game settings and GPU settings.
  • In the game's Settings you can enable or disable 'Mip-Mapping'. Attention! The first time you join a battle after enabling mip-mapping, you might experience some 'display pauses'. This happens because Mips have to be created. This won’t take more than a minute.
  • In your graphics card's settings, you can adjust 'Antialiasing' and 'Anisotropic Filtering'. These change the image on the screen in a number of ways.

Hardware acceleration in Linux~

With the release of Google Chrome 21, developers improved the security of the built-in Adobe Flash Player's runtime environment. Apart from safety improvements, the use of PPAPI allowed the use of full hardware acceleration for Flash content in Linux.
1. Go to chrome://plugins page, switch on the PPAPI version of flash player (if it was switched off).
2. Go to chrome://flags page, switch on the 5th option ("Override software rendering list").
3. Restart Chrome, go to chrome://gpu/ page, and find "Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated" — the acceleration should already be working.
If you don't like the result, you can always switch off the PPAPI version of Flash player. Users also report problems with newer versions of Chrome, and versions of Flash Player higher than 11.4, so it's better to disable automatic updating for the browser.

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