Mutter Can Cause A Gaming/OpenGL Performance Hit Too

[Paradox Ethereal]

My experience with windowmanager, points to the fact that openbox, is the fastest, with regards to 3d-performance. Then the standard windowmananger in KDE is actually quite fast, and nearly as fast as openbox. And, particulary with regards to jitter, gnome with metacity, takes quite a performance drop.

[chickenfoot]

A comparison to one of the slim window managers like Fluxbox would be interesting and I'd also try the games with no window manager at all, just plain Xorg.

[V!NCENT]

e17 hasn't just been a window manager for a loooong time; It's a desktop shell, much like Plasma and it has a complete Xcb widget toolkit, desktop widgets and all sorts of awesome libs for stuff like animation. It's more like KDE4 but without apps and it has a login manager complete with animated backgrounds, fancy desktop rain, snow, fire and a Xine frontend... You name it.

[oneman]

unredirect fullscreen windows... unredirect fullscreen windows... unredirect fullscreen windows..

this would fix the performance issue in any compositing window manager, however, your pop up notifications may lack a shadow.

I think that if it doesn't yet exist, there should be an API for each window manager or a generic one that lets the 'game' or other fullscreen app preference itself that it wants to be unredirected for max performance. That way by default everything can remain composited but it can be easily changed on a per app basis based on preference, Ie unredirect for the latest 3d game, but leave on for things such as google earth

[nitroflow]

Actually metacity also has compositing support so please test again WITH COMPOSITING ENABLED to make it fair. And please expand the comparative by throwing non-composited WMs such as WindowMaker, Fluxbox, E17, etc.

[elanthis]

In other news, the Linux graphics stack still needs work and new software usually has bugs. Back to you, Bob.

[mirv]

@mirv,
In case you missed it:
Mutter doesn't have software/framebuffer fallback and as a result LLVM-softpipe is required for JIT compiling as Mesa-softpipe is too slow

Ahh, cheers. Yes, I did miss it (sorry, long day).

[V!NCENT]

@mirv,
In case you missed it:
Mutter doesn't have software/framebuffer fallback and as a result LLVM-softpipe is required for JIT compiling as Mesa-softpipe is too slow

[mirv]

Loooool! Hahahaha xD
Yo Mutter is so fat, she needs LLVM and a Core i7 just to run at acceptable framerates without hardware acceleration!

I was under the impression gcc still produced faster code? Perhaps it should be "she needs icc" (the intel compiler).

Jokes aside, and despite some people upset over the title (I would think it obvious that any sort of compositing environment might have some 3D overhead), the actual performance hit of any overhead is good to have tested.

[V!NCENT]

Your mutter is so FAT, she's being sued by Microsoft for patent infringement.

Loooool! Hahahaha xD
Yo Mutter is so fat, she needs LLVM and a Core i7 just to run at acceptable framerates without hardware acceleration!