Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 10 March 2011 at 01:23 PM EST. Page 5 of 5. 41 Comments.

With the last game for today, the Radeon X1950PRO and Radeon HD 4670 both had higher frame-rates with Compiz while the HD 5670 had the same frame-rates under Gallium3D. The Catalyst driver continued running the same.

Like in all other tests, the Nouveau Gallium3D driver had a lower frame-rate when Compiz was enabled. With Urban Terror, the NVIDIA driver was minimally affected.

The Catalyst driver was the least affected by running Compiz (its performance was unchanged) while the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver actually had a higher frame-rate, but this may be partially due to some syncing possibly going on when Metacity is active.

The Nouveau driver's performance was certainly lower when Compiz was running. With the NVIDIA driver, its performance varied from being nearly unchanged to dropping a fair amount when Compiz 0.9.4 was running with these full-screen OpenGL games at the monitor's native resolution.

You can further analyze the results on OpenBenchmarking.org.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.