Just a quick post to say that the second and last part of the system76 Pangolin Performance’s first impressions is coming soon – I have it written down, but I need to review the whole text and add some pictures in it. You don’t want to read through all this text without some pictures!
In the mean time, I learned from my trusty RSS reader a couple of days ago that gnash 0.8.8 has been released. I’ve had the chance to compile it with various USE flags combinations in Gentoo to take a look at the new version.
I’ve been impressed with this new release. Youtube videos now work, which is kind of… essential! You must, however, delete and block Youtube cookies. Not a problem for me since I’m not registered on it, but still! Video performance was a bit poor – the CPU jumped to 100% while playing.
I’ve also taken a look on Newgrounds to see how it handled animations. For some, it buckled, for others, the frame rate was incredibly good, with very low CPU consumption. I only tested the AGG backend for animations. The OpenGL one only displayed a grey box every time and I know that the Cairo one ain’t quite ready yet. As far a rendering goes, I haven’t watched enough videos and animations, but from what I saw, it was pretty sharp in general.
I went back to adobe-flash with the nspluginwrapper, but I might return back to gnash from time to time to play around with it. And if you haven’t, give it a spin, you might be surprised!
