The Cost Of Running Compiz

[nightmorph]

What good does it do to push 400 FPS when your monitor only refreshes itself at 60hz?

Even the low FPS (in the 30s to 60s) reported by the open-source drivers should be sufficient.

The article is useless because the benchmarks ignore the monitor issue -- in practice, you'll never see the different between 100 and 400 FPS. Your screen simply does not refresh itself that many times per second. Most screens run at 50 to 70 Hz at max resolution.

[eoxx]

Hi,

I know that KDE/Kubuntu users are a minority but ... We would also like to know how kde is affected by the graphic card we choose

will there be the same tests for Kubuntu with Kwin -with and without- desktop effects ... Just to see if KDE is more affected or not than the classic ubuntu distribution ..

Thanks

[[Knuckles]]

Unredirecting fullscreen windows has its costs. Kwin does it, and then you get things like this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177495 .

But yeah, I too would like to see some kwin testing, maybe even in comparision to compiz.

[Jimbo]

nice benchmarks.

I think that a nice set of benchmarks should be done between intel, ati 300/500 OSS, ati 300/500 propietary, ati 600/700 OSS, ati 600/700 propietary, nvidia OSS and nvidia propietary. Maybe monthly based¿? and using the latest OSS drivers (xorg edgers).

This will show how the performance and improvements of OSS advances.

[Ragas]

Phoronix, normally when you do a test you always include the ultra alpha git testing versions.
Why didn't you use the compiz 0.9 version in this test? Since it is, right now, almost in place and will likely be included in the next distro-updates

Unredirecting fullscreen windows has its costs. Kwin does it, and then you get things like this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177495 .

But yeah, I too would like to see some kwin testing, maybe even in comparison to compiz.

Such things should only happen when something constantly reappearing is rendered in front of the fullscreen window.

On compiz I never had problems with the unredirect windows option.
And actually I disabled this option on my machine with an nvidia card since the performance drop isn't too bad an I don't like the flickering.

[MathGuy]

It happend so many times before but this time I really had to register and write this post. Phoronix should really pay more attention to numbers and their math. For example, in the "Unigine Heaven v2.0 1980x1080" we see that the Metacity result is 74% faster than Compiz, not 63%. I haven't found a rounding of the numbers that would actually lead to 63%. If Metacity leads to 25.34 fps and Compiz to 14.56, then Metacity is (25.34-14.56)/14.56=0.74... times faster than Compiz. On the contrary, Compiz reaches just (25.34-14.56)/25.34=0.425=42.5% of the performance of Metacity. Now question to the reader: By what percentage is Compiz slower than Metacity?

Overall, Phoronix should definitly come in contact with someone with a more academic background. I'm happy that the Phoronix Benchmark Suite incorporated variance measurements to help with the significance. But this is definitely not enough. The test scenarios for the article should be designed more according to the "scientific approach" to do evaluation. Otherwise, Phoronix just targets readers who are just able to understand black/white messages. "Scientific depth" is the keyphrase here.

[nanonyme]

There's several imo unexpected things in this benchmark considering radeon drivers (other parts of the test were mostly uninteresting).
1) It seems that Compiz according to these benchmarks has a worse effect on DRI2 than DRI1 when it should be the other way around. Why?
2) One test shows DRI2 having better performance with Compiz than without. Why?
Some developer could possibly enlighten us with an explanation attempt?

[HannesB]

Nice Tests,

a new comparison between Win / MacOS and Lin without Compiz/Aero/??? would be interesting. (hoping that my favourite OS could be more competative)

In my opinion there should be a workaround in compiz (or in Gnome/KDE), that automatically stops/restarts desktop-effects on "blacklisted" applications.
This also would circumvent problems like Vsync issues, that some drivers have.
Of course it would be better to fix the driver issues, but I dont really believe in it...
Has anyone a better solution than writing a shell-script for each game?

[garytr24]

What good does it do to push 400 FPS when your monitor only refreshes itself at 60hz?

Even the low FPS (in the 30s to 60s) reported by the open-source drivers should be sufficient.

The article is useless because the benchmarks ignore the monitor issue -- in practice, you'll never see the different between 100 and 400 FPS. Your screen simply does not refresh itself that many times per second. Most screens run at 50 to 70 Hz at max resolution.

I find it offensive that more people don't understand this. In a game, if you're running at 60fps, each frame is taking 16ms. If you're catching input for the next frame while drawing the current, that's an input lag of 33ms between what shows up on the screen. If you're running at 120fps with the same update/display logic, the input lag becomes 16ms, a noticeable difference to gamers who actually game or musicians, among others. The fact that you'll basically drop the first frame b/c of your monitor's limitations doesn't mean it's not worth catching input, sending it to the network, etc. When you count network updates, you can see why people care (hopefully). There's a lot more going on than display. Games really need to run as fast as they can. Some games are smarter and run the update loop 2x times more than the renderer, but I'm not sure about quake 1-3 based stuff.

[garytr24]

what they do on consoles is lock the frame rate, and slow down the input anyway, so everyone's on the same level playing field, but that's silly for PC's.