∞ Flash Player 11 is 'next gen game console,' says Adobe

Adobe plans to roll out Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 in October, according to a new blog post from Adobe’s Flash product manager Tom Nguyen.

Integral to the new Flash release is “Stage 3D,” a new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics architecture that delivers radically improved 3D graphics performance compared with Flash 10 – on the order of 1000 times improved, according to Nguyen.

“Additionally, these releases deliver new features to support theater-quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high-quality HD video conferencing, and a powerful, flexible architecture for leveraging native device and platform capabilities,” said Nguyen.

Stage 3D Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable developers to use the graphics processors on a wide variety of computers, with features including dynamic audio, low-latency multiplayer networking, 1080P video playback, voice chat and other capabilities.

Nguyen says to expect the first crop of Flash 11-optimized games to arrive later this year and early in 2012.