Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?

[mtippett]

What happened to the Catalyst team starting around late 2009 and through 2010 to the present? Their driver stopped sucking. Maybe they got lucky and hired one or more brilliant minds.

Now if only we can make it not suck and make it open source. Damn. The numbers for r?00g are encouraging though.

Late 2009 is when the driver hit a sweet spot. The team (my team) had basically got the tempo and vibe to match the development speed of Windows for the Radeon HD 5000 series launch.

Driver development with 10's of millions of lines of code is slow and steady (particularly with the ecosystem continually changing). ATI is great at maintaining quality as it gets there.

I made the move from AMD when I felt we had hit a good spot (late 2009), from there they've continued to hold the ship steady and continue pushing out good features.

[deanjo]

Hi Michael,

I have noticed too that Compiz mostly doesn't decrease performance. However, KWin does and the difference can be huge. It would be cool if you made an article that compares:
- Gnome without Compiz
- Gnome with Compiz
- KDE without KWin
- KDE with KWin

I bet the numbers will be very interesting.

With full screen apps you shouldn't see any difference in performance if Kwin is configured with:

UnredirectFullscreen=true

This setting is on by default in openSUSE.

[droste]

Hi Michael,

I have noticed too that Compiz mostly doesn't decrease performance. However, KWin does and the difference can be huge. It would be cool if you made an article that compares:
- Gnome without Compiz
- Gnome with Compiz
- KDE without KWin
- KDE with KWin

I bet the numbers will be very interesting.

To see if KWin is to be blamed for this, you could remove one variable:
- KDE without KWin
- KDE with KWin
- KDE with Compiz

[droste]

EDIT: with/without KWin means with compositing (desktop effects) enabled/disabled

[Drago]

Is it just me, or Radeon FOSS drivers are some like %50 of Catalyst. I don't know about lower resolutions, but at HD things are fantastic

[DoDoENT]

While we are talking about performance impacts from composited environment, I have a question for all of you: do you have problem with watching a VDPAU accelerated video while composition is turned on?

I have such a problem on my GTX 470. While having kwin composition enabled, if I open a movie in SMplayer (or mplayer) configured to use VDPAU, X freezes after a while, or after skipping video (jumping to the middle of movie or similar), or sometimes immediately after starting video playback. This happens always while watching 720p or higher resolution videos, and sometimes even with smaller videos. Although X is freezed, key events are processed so I am able to pause playback (this unfreezes the X).

If I disable composition (suspend desktop effects), playback runs normally.

The system is Arch x64, with KDE 4.6, nvidia gtx 470, and default driver from Arch repository (260.19.44-1).

[devius]

Is it just me, or Radeon FOSS drivers are some like %50 of Catalyst. I don't know about lower resolutions, but at HD things are fantastic

That was also on my mind. On some tests it was even higher than that. Not bad at all.
Also, KWin tests as well would be great!

[darkbasic]

I have noticed too that Compiz mostly doesn't decrease performance. However, KWin does and the difference can be huge.

Uh? I did lots of benchmarks with Gallium and Kwin-4.6 enabled/disabled and there was no difference at all when using full screen mode.

[Marko M]

For me Compiz sucks when gaming both on Nvidia and Ati. Killing Compiz manually when entering game is such party breaker so I made scrips to do this automatically when entering game, and revert this when exiting game. Here are the scripts, hope someone finds them useful:

http://www.techytalk.info/2010/06/co...witch-scripts/

Cheers

[pingufunkybeat]

Uh? I did lots of benchmarks with Gallium and Kwin-4.6 enabled/disabled and there was no difference at all when using full screen mode.

KWin always disables compositing for full-screen apps (like deanjo says, there is an option controlling this, and many distros use it by default).