does anyone know how you write code to implement drawing operations like this efficiently? i remember in the late 90s there was stuff you could do, for instance

does anyone know how you write code to implement drawing operations like this efficiently? i remember in the late 90s there was stuff you could do, for instance, where you had a large number of low-opacity swirling ellipse objects that looked like smoke (basically a very crude particle system) - and it brought my Pentium 3 450 to its knees. (this is what i'm referring to: http://www.presstube.com/project.php?id=212 http://www.presstube.com/project.php?id=212 ) have computers just gotten faster, or does Flash have some way of doing, say, hardware-accelerated graphics?