Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce

[whizse]

One big caveat with GNOME Shell is that it does only unredirect fullscreen SDL windows, which covers a lot of native games, but not anything running in Wine.

I have seen a few cases where performance in a game drops to the floor because of this, so for the moment I'm patching Mutter to unredirect anything running fullscreen:

Enable unredirect for all fullscreen windows. Not just unredirect-override.

--- mutter-3.2.1.orig/src/compositor/meta-window-actor.c
+++ mutter-3.2.1/src/compositor/meta-window-actor.c
@@ -1219,7 +1219,7 @@ meta_window_actor_should_unredirect (Met
   MetaScreen *screen = meta_window_get_screen (metaWindow);
   MetaWindowActorPrivate *priv = self->priv;
 
-  if (meta_window_is_override_redirect (metaWindow) && priv->opacity == 0xff && !priv->argb32)
+  if (priv->opacity == 0xff && !priv->argb32)
     {
       int screen_width, screen_height;
       MetaRectangle window_rect;

[16050]

Why isn't LXDE considered? My only guess is that it's not complete enough on it's own.

I agree, and performance on Fluxbox would be interesting as well.

[mitcoes]

Gnome shell and ATI Did it work well?

I missed enlightment E17 and Pantheon alpha, Mate, openbox, razor qt, and fluxbox.

But I have an ATi HD 4250 and i have not been able to run Gnome Shell or Cinnamon with catalyst drivers because a bug in Mutter / ATI

How did you solve this bug?

Is it bypassed anyway?

I do like to have installed 3 distros / experimental now sabayon + backup LMDE + main Mint12.

And test every desktop.

1 consideration Ubuntu Gnome is not true Gnome - at least I have just read the only way of a "true" gnome in ubuntu is installing in text mode the server version and from the console install Gnome from Gnome PPA

2 If there are a way of use Gnome Shell with my integrated ATI HD 4250 I would like to know the trick. i also have a Nvidia 9600, but I do not want to plug in it only to test Gnome 3.

3. Perhaps in other post, E17, Pantheon, Openbox alone and +KDE and +Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, razor qt and fluxbox, as alternative desktops - Or any other one i miss - would be nice to be tested.

4.- As at any good article, as i use to read here, i do like to read the 5W, and I would like to read something about why the Catalyst driver is almost independent from the desktop in gaming, and Nvidia graphic drivers aren't. also I would like to know this tests in other OSs as MS WOS and OSX - perhaps it will never happen at phoronix, i do not know why - and some explanation of why the difference of performance between one drivers or others. In this case the lack of standard deviation in AMD drivers I do not know if is better or worse because it is a maximum for all or a minimum for all, what I can imagine more if I have the same tests with other OSs.

Thanks in advance, I enjoyed a lot reading this article, but I always have more questions when I read something like this. And if you do not answer this nobody else will do it at my feeds. Because you are my best Linux benchmark blog, and perhaps the best over the net.

[Bruners]

I missed enlightment E17 and Pantheon alpha, Mate, openbox, razor qt, and fluxbox.

Some of those are just window managers which work inside Gnome/KDE and can't be taken into consideration in a test like this, for razor qt it is still in early developement.

[rohcQaH]

reaction from the kwin developer:

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/02/about-compositors-and-game-rendering-performance/

[Aleve Sicofante]

@author of benchmarks
please don't use similar colors! really.

I have a hard time distinguishing between Unity2D and Xfce cause they're both dark red.

Agreed. It's not like we're lacking in colours to choose. RGBCMYK. There you go, seven perfectly distinguishable colours. You can even make them a little ligher or darker and will still be distinct.

[curaga]

I agree, and performance on Fluxbox would be interesting as well.

Unless the WM is doing something stupid, all of the non-compositing ones should have about the same performance. inb4 someone asks for twm.

[kraftman]

KDE with or without compositing? I guess, with?

I hope so, because those numbers aren't so great. In KDE you can easily turn it off and you can set the option to suspend compositing automatically. Gnome 3 does the same and it seems there's no way to fix this in Unity, so it's a real looser here.

[0xCAFE]

Can anybody tell me what was the reason for Unity's switch from Gnome3/Mutter compositing to Compiz? Because they could hire the Compiz developer? But there seem to be maintenance problems with Compiz (see recent news).

[funkSTAR]

Spring cleaning

Can anybody tell me what was the reason for Unity's switch from Gnome3/Mutter compositing to Compiz? Because they could hire the Compiz developer? But there seem to be maintenance problems with Compiz (see recent news).

One stated reason was "better performance" on Compiz. Well well well.. No it turns out that Compiz is a slow and unmaintainable beast. Nice work Canonical.

At the next UDS Canonical will drop pipe dreams like Compiz and Upstart. They already rooted out some excessive and obsolete stuff like Kubuntu.