Ubuntu Sees Need To Improve Unity's Performance

Posted by Michael Larabel on October 29, 2012

As part of the push to make Ubuntu a competitive gaming platform, developers at Canonical and within the Ubuntu community will be working to improve the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager performance for Ubuntu 13.04.

By now most Phoronix readers know that the Unity/Compiz performance is very poor for gaming and leads to OpenGL slowdowns more than the other Linux desktops. At the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, the Unity performance plans were discussed.

Among the Unity performance enhancements being planned for Ubuntu 13.04 are UBUS enhancements, improving the glib sources usage for timeouts, texture all the components in just one spot and not a draw call for every component at every time, and enabling Compiz unredirected rendering on full-screen windows by default. However, the unredirected full-screen window rendering by default will not happen automatically for Nouveau and Intel drivers due to bugs.

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