After years of fanboys blaming Adobe and Steve Jobs calling Adobe "lazy," Apple has finally offered low-level access to H.264 decoding capabilities to third party developers.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/22/tn2267
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New from Apple in Mac OS X 10.6.3:
The Video Decode Acceleration framework is a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames.
This sounds pretty much exactly like what Adobe has been asking for — it should provide a big improvement to Flash Player H.264 playback. (Via Michael Tsai.)"
So, it was Apple's fault (but some of us knew this
) and now we may get better Flash performance in OS X. Unless Adobe is so pissed at Jobs by now, that it decides to screw the platform....
It may be limited to only certain hardware, though.