while working with a colleague at megaphone, it recently came to my attention that there is currently no way to enable hardware acceleration at the .swf level with flex builder 3 or the flex framework's standalone compiler, mxmlc. hence, a .swf file compiled via the flex framework or mxmlc currently cannot use hardware acceleration when running in the standalone version of flash player.
i logged a bug as soon as i confirmed the compiler-option omission with flex builder product manager, matt chotin. please vote for it if you'd like to see this issue addressed. matt's comments on the bug seem encouraging; he indicates that the option could be added to the flex framework's 3.4 and 4.0 versions within the 4.0 development cycle. until then, if you're desperate, you'll have to write a post-compiler tool to set the appropriate swf tag options yourself. such a tool could be written as an air app, based on thibault imbert's SWFExplorer.
mr. chotin said that flex builder 4 (now "flash builder 4") likely won't have a gui option to enable hardware acceleration, but that it might provide support via the project properties dialog's "additional compiler arguments" field.
note that in flex builder 3, hardware acceleration *can* be enabled for .swf files running in a browser by adding the appropriate wmode attribute setting in your project's html template's .swf-object/embed tags.
Posted by moock at May 21, 2009 04:18 PM