Bullets 'n' Babes

A new feature in both the Flash player v10.1 beta and the latest Nvidia GPU beta driver is GPU-accelerated video.
Read about it here

FLAWLESS FLASH VIDEO
Put an end to stuttering online videos and enjoy smoother, full screen SD and HD content with an NVIDIA® graphics processor. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta is here, with full GPU-acceleration for NVIDIA® ION™ and NVIDIA® GeForce®-powered PCs; and support for NVIDIA® Tegra®-powered devices coming soon. Visit these HD Gallery pages from your favorite websites to view GPU-accelerated Adobe Flash 10.1 content. The full production release of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available in 1H 2010.

What this means is that stress is taken off your CPU and put onto your GPU when playing back Flash video (SD or HD) from within a web browser. This should be really helpful for those running weaker CPUs, like a ~2.0GHz mobile Core 2 Duo.

You can get the Flash v10.1 beta from here. The latest Nvidia drivers can be downloaded from here.

Nvidia have a list of supported GPUs here. I have no idea of whether or not ATI Radeon drivers support this feature.

It's most interesting for Atom computers which struggle terribly with iplayer and youtube HD, even the dual core ones. So now you can have an ION media PC that you can use for proper surfing and flash video watching as well.

IE9 and Firefox will be adding GPU support for faster rendering too.

You can get Dual Core Atom CPUs? I never knew that. I gather they're also shite at multi-tasking too. As a second PC they're a good idea but personally I'd rather get a 13" proper notebook. With proper Dual Core processor. Sure they cost more but they'd be suitable as a netbook style laptop and proper notebook too.

IE9 and Firefox will be adding GPU support for faster rendering too.

I read Firefox will be getting it first.

Well I wouldn't use an Atom for a main system as I'm used to much quicker speeds but for a netbook, lounge PC etc they're great. You can get the Core 2 Solo laptops with great life like the Acer Timeline but they're a few inches bigger.