CNET reports Adobe released a beta version of Flash Player 10. This new edition has better support for 3D animation and video hardware acceleration, among other improvements.
Adobe said that Flash Player 10 will now support custom visual effects, created with Adobe's free Pixel Bender tools. Developers can write code to create effects that can be rendered by Flash Player at runtime.
Developers can also now target code to render through graphics processors, speeding up performance and freeing CPU bandwidth, Adobe says.