With the advent of Flash Player 10 at the end of 2008, Adobe opened up a new generation of image processing techniques using the Pixel Bender system. In its simplest form, Pixel Bender allows the Flash or Flex developer to run mathematical algorithms used for image processing (and in fact other tasks) at a greatly increased rate. Flash Player does this by offloading those calculations to the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) which is often faster than the main CPU.

This tutorial demonstrates the use of the Pixel Bender system in Flex Builder 3.