An Important GNOME Performance Fix Has Landed

[pal666]

Modifying the layout can have an impact on all the children and all the ancestors widgets (e.g. if the size of the time text changed, then the date widget position has to be recalculate in order to still be centered, and if the height changed as well, then all the whole top-bar will need to adapt and all the maximized windows will need to adapt because of it).

this is just one tiny line of widgets. how do you think word processors or web browsers render faster than one fps?

[pal666]

I think 60 FPS is more than enough for a desktop rendering

because you are not aware that some people might have faster than 60hz monitors and more that one monitor

[sarmad]

I think 60 FPS is more than enough for a desktop rendering. Of course, it *could* be better, and probably should as well, but not *at all cost*: everything needs to be prioritized at some point. As long as the desktop is around 60FPS, I'm not sure optimization is the highest concern for a desktop environment. I'm not sure a user would see much difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS on a classic desktop use. Maybe during animations...

Not really. People can actually notice a difference between 60fps and anything below it, so even 60fps vs 50fps is noticeable. Hence, the desktop should manage well above 60fps so that hickups in performance don't bring it below 60fps.

[Brisse]

Is this the reason why Gnome runs like absolute horse manure on my 144Hz display? I tried Gnome a month or so ago, just out of curiosity, and OH MY GOD does it run like crap. Stutter-fest :-/

Were you running Wayland? I run my monitor at 120hz and GNOME on Wayland is absolute stutterfest, but it runs fine on x.org.

[tessio]

Good to hear that more bugs are being found and squished. Now....how about that massive memory leak ?

Yeah.. I was hopping this was the performance fix in question when I saw the news...

[RealNC]

That's approx. going from 60 FPS to 77 FPS, which is very slow for just the desktop on a modern development machine.

Is this the reason why Gnome runs like absolute horse manure on my 144Hz display? I tried Gnome a month or so ago, just out of curiosity, and OH MY GOD does it run like crap. Stutter-fest :-/

[Ronshere]

"Even if they were relayouting it... How would that be a major performance impact?"
It's a gain of 4 milliseconds but it occurs once every second so it should add up on system performance in the long run.

[carewolf]

"With this fix, the median frame-time drops from 16.97ms to 12.97ms."

Seems insanely high for just rendering the desktop.

Well, depends on what they are measuring. You can't compare 2D rendering to 3D, this might be the time it takes for a full screen redraw, but which is something that should never happen with 2D rendering. You only paint when something changes, and you only repaint the area that changed.

A web-browser can easily run in 60FPS and seem perfectly smooth, eventhough the content it is showing would take almost a second to render from scratch.

[Creak]

Even if they were relayouting it... How would that be a major performance impact? Text-rendering can be expensive, but you have to render a screen full of it to matter, and layout can be expenseive if you need to handle advanced scripts, but latin like stuff like numbers are just variable length glyph that should already have their sizes cached.

Modifying the layout can have an impact on all the children and all the ancestors widgets (e.g. if the size of the time text changed, then the date widget position has to be recalculate in order to still be centered, and if the height changed as well, then all the whole top-bar will need to adapt and all the maximized windows will need to adapt because of it).

[Creak]

That's approx. going from 60 FPS to 77 FPS, which is very slow for just the desktop on a modern development machine.

However it's good that they work on picking those low-hanging fruits :-)

I think 60 FPS is more than enough for a desktop rendering. Of course, it *could* be better, and probably should as well, but not *at all cost*: everything needs to be prioritized at some point. As long as the desktop is around 60FPS, I'm not sure optimization is the highest concern for a desktop environment. I'm not sure a user would see much difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS on a classic desktop use. Maybe during animations...

As a user I find the display of seconds to be useless and distracting but it still should be optimized.

It's not just the seconds, the fix goes higher than that: it prevents from recalculating the layout of any widget if the new text in it doesn't change the dimensions. So it touches pretty much everything that has text in it.