Issues with flash and other adobe products.

Question

Ok, so i've been using flash player for quite a number of years now aswell as other products like acrobat reader when i used windows, over the years flash player has developed into a totally inneffecient and almost unusable product. on top of the security issues of past with flash player and especially acrobat reader, with remote code execution vulnerabilities, i have, as have thousands of others noticed a very large decrease in performance with flash.
i should note that a year or two ago, i could play HD flash content no problem, both 720 and 1080 resolutions, full screen without any issue. i would expect it to take up a decent portion of cpu cycles, which it did, i use to be able to run flash content at 720 with about 30 - 50% cpu usage. now it seems with flash 10 my AMD Athlon 4000+ struggles to play even 720 videos. My cpu is by no means a top performer, it is however capable of handling somewhere in the region of a billion instructions per second. for video content to require that amount of data to be handled is rediculous.
HD content played back on my local machine using a different codec, my cpu barely even uses 5 - 10% cpu time, not only that, these videos have roughly about the same compression rates as flash videos. i just don't understand how flash can require so much resources without taking into account innefficient and bloated code.
today i tried to access a web page that required flash content to display images, it was not a video, but an image database, going from one page to the next took somewhere in the region of 20 - 30 seconds, while my cpu maxed out at 100% and firefox stopped responding, which is totally unnacceptable.
it wouldn't normally be a problem if there were good alternatives, but there aren't any, im stuck with this piece of crap software if i want to view any flash content. the only real alternative is to upgrade, which i am not prepared to do if the next version of flash is just going to push those boundries even further for features i don't need.
my proposal is to:
1. rewrite the code with effeciency rather than new features in mind, if that means getting able programmers in, then so be it.
2. make flash modulous, where the basic package provides capabilties to play flash content and separate plugins to provide for all the individual unnecessary features that are not required for basic flash content. surely you can build a package that provides all those plugins for regular users and a basic package + optional plugins for those who know what they want or need.
it really makes no sense why such a large corporation with all this experience to provide a product that quite simply.. sucks, well it does actually, either your programmers are incapable of creating a stable, efficient product or you are purposly trying to push hardware upgrades onto people. lets not forget that flash content is huge business on the web, adobe flash player has a strangle hold on that market, it would be naive to think that hardware vendors have not approached adobe with specifications to further make the money wheel go round.
sort it out, because i for one, am in the process of completely removing my dependancy on adobe flash, if the right product comes along, others will do to, in droves. it's a bubble that is going to burst and there is no way back when you have millions of lines of quite frankly, amateurish code.

Answer 1

Eric,
The GTX 650 would be priced slightly higher than the GT 640 - and then, the OP would have to "settle" for only 1GB of graphics RAM instead of 2GB. The GTX 650 is currently not available with 2GB of RAM.
Both the GT 640 and the GTX 650 are based on the same GPU - the GK107, with 384 CUDA cores. The two major differences are that the GK107 on the GTX 650 is clocked higher than the one on the GT 640, and that the GTX 650 has almost triple the memory bandwidth of the GT 640 (80 GB/s versus 28.8 GB/s).