I'm planning a big multimedia presentation would like to know how to get the best framerate out of Flash Player. Currently, using this simple benchmark tool, the ultra-quality stage seems to drop the frame rate quite a bit and yet the CPU seems to be hardly sweating.
I'm not sure what else could be the bottleneck...
How else can I determine the bottleneck?
It looks to me that while overall your CPU is, as you put it, barely sweating the probable reason why it is struggling is because the test is fully utilising 1 CPU core and Flash is probably not multi-threaded and cannot use more than 1 CPU for the work that is needed.
If you open up task manager and see that chrome.exe is using 12% of your CPU time which is 1/8 your total CPU power then it is the fact that Flash is not multi-threaded that is the problem.
More CPU cores available does not mean more power is available to any one task, see my answer at How do I calculate clock speed in multi-core processors?
-=EDIT=-
I just tried the test on Firefox and on my quad-core system the cpu usage was at about 48%. I'd assume that it is therefore partially multi-threaded, using a worker (calculation) thread and a rendering thread. I would expect your system to therefore see approximately 23-25% CPU usage on the Chrome.exe process.
Weird, just tried it in Chrome and it is only using the 25% (12% for your system) CPU time I originally expected...
