Why is it that when I play a flash file at the size that my standalone flash player opens it at, it runs fine, but when I maximize it, it runs much slower? I've always wondered about this.

Dogenzaka said:
Why is it that when I play a flash file at the size that my standalone flash player opens it at, it runs fine, but when I maximize it, it runs much slower? I've always wondered about this.

It's like running a game in 1280p vs running it in 420p.

What Ko-san says, Flash is a vector based animation, meaning that everything you see are mathematically described shapes with colors or textures attached to them.

The thing now is, to make it show up on your screen the computer has to translate the equation describing the shape into a 2D raster image. The higher your zoom in the bigger the resulting image gets, the more time is needed to calculate the frame.

Thanks. I think I get it now, but is there no kind of flash player that can cache the frames of a flash file for faster playback after 1 runthrough, or is that just impossible right now?

There's no player that can do that, as far as I know.
But I also haven't looked around to be honest.