Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?

[MùPùF]

Looking at those results, mostly on Nvidia side, makes me wonder how much efforts are being dedicated by Gallium3D team to improve performance on Gallium3D infraestructure.

Does anyone know if there is any work beeing done to improve Gallium3D infraestructure performance in the wild?

I didn't notice any special/cool patch for Gallium3D on 2.6.38. I could be wrong, and wish to Please correct me if i'm wrong....

How much effort in the Gallium3D architecture? As far as I know, not much. Work is happening on the gallium drivers.

But there are outstanding patches that entered the 2.6.38 (new memory manager, pageflip, zcompression) AND mesa (merge of the nvc0 code into the nv50) lately and that brought a really nice performance improvement

[tacco]

Yes, it does. Nvidia Quadro 4600 fx.

[xpander]

havent noticed any perf drops with compiz on.
ati 5770 user, with catalyst drivers

[deanjo]

havent noticed any perf drops with compiz on.

And there is a statement that really matters. As long as the end user does not perceive any noticeable obstructions to using their software, then it really doesn't matter. The real issue isn't if it drops performance but if it drops performance to a point where disabling compiz becomes a must to run applications effectively.

[Strider]

This is an interesting benchmark and I should check that on my machine.
There seems to be a huge performance drop with compiz with the Nvidia binary driver, whic was totally unexpected ... I always considered gaming performance with compiz to be on par with metacity when using Nvidia's driver, which may not be true anymore.

The last game I've benchmarked, Left4dead 2 on Ubuntu and Windows 7, did not show any performance drop with Compiz, but then again it was with 260.x drivers.

Phoronix articles benchmarks games based on old technologies, so when benchmarking on my machine, I'll make sure to add a few newer games.

I'll be running OpenArena, World of Padman, Nexuiz, and Urban Terror to compare with phoronix results but I can't publish a benchmark with 3 games based on Quake 3 Arena's engine and one game based on Quake 1 ...
I'll add to the mix the following :

- UT 2004
- Doom 3 or Quake 4 or both
- Unigine benchmark
- Half Life 2 Lost Coast, with latest Wine version
- Maybe Oblivion, if I find a way to benchmark it. (still with Wine)
- An Unreal Engine 3 game would be cool too. (still with Wine)
- Maybe more ...

Finally, I'll implement WM switching in Lutris ( http://lutris.net ), the options have been in the GUI since the start of the project but hasn't been doing anything ...

[Michael]

Phoronix articles benchmarks games based on old technologies, so when benchmarking on my machine, I'll make sure to add a few newer games.

I'll be running OpenArena, World of Padman, Nexuiz, and Urban Terror to compare with phoronix results but I can't publish a benchmark with 3 games based on Quake 3 Arena's engine and one game based on Quake 1 ...

Because the open-source drivers can't handle Unigine or anything more interesting.

[pingufunkybeat]

They can handle much more complicated stuff than Quake3, though:

Doom3
Quake4
Penumbra games
Amnesia

These are not open source, but that's an issue with open source games, and not open source drivers.

[Michael]

They can handle much more complicated stuff than Quake3, though:

Doom3
Quake4

Not well without S3TC.

Penumbra games
Amnesia

I see no automated tests or test profiles.

[pingufunkybeat]

I finished Doom3 and RoE without S3TC.

Quake4 requires S3TC, but is this a problem? That works now, the game runs on Radeon, and probably also on other drivers.

Amnesia and Penumbra might be difficult to benchmark automatically, you're right.

[Strider]

Because the open-source drivers can't handle Unigine or anything more interesting.

That's correct, I concluded the same thing when I tried benchmarking Nouveau. It's still possible to benchmark UT2004 though.

I'll try to go as far as I can with the Nouveau driver but my main focus is on NVidia proprietary driver.

While I'm at it, I'll also compare performance drop with and without Unity, even if it still has serious issues that make it inappropriate for gaming (the panel does not hide when switching to full screen games). I've noticed unusual performance drop with Unity which shouldn't happen since it's only a Compiz plugin.

I finished Doom3 and RoE without S3TC.

Strange, I couldn't get Doom 3 to run with Nouveau, I'll check on that again.