Senior Member
Both Compiz and KWin 4 provide that feature, but it has been broken in fglrx since 8 releases or something...Originally Posted by bridgman
EDIT: Ah well, and it (at least in Compiz) requires OpenGL 2, so no solution for you bridgman, sorry
Junior Member
yep i would love to see the blur effect on ati hardware to.
the kde4 _and_ compiz blur work on nvidia without any problems.
without this effect transparency is practically useless.
(intel drivers are effected by the lack of blur too... -> http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Blur )
Phoronix Member
Broken? Or *removed*?Both Compiz and KWin 4 provide that feature, but it has been broken in fglrx since 8 releases or something...
EDIT: Ah well, and it (at least in Compiz) requires OpenGL 2, so no solution for you bridgman, sorry
Senior Member
Transparent window-decorations are a feature of the window-manager, so it can't be removed from the graphics-driver.
Uhm... I'd say _with_ this effect transparency is useless. Isn't it the whole point of transparency to be able to make out the background of a window? So why would you want to blur it?
And am I the only one who thinks the Vista window-decorations are extremely ugly? Call me nostalgic but when I'm stuck on a windows-machine I always enable the "classic-look".
Last edited by Zhick; 03-07-2009 at 04:00 AM.
Junior Member
Imagine a transparent window bar over another windowbar, the text doesnt look too nice with another text at the back shining through.
and ofc you can make out whats in the background even if its blurred, its not like transparency is used to read text in the background...
Phoronix Member
Now, the (my) focus here is if the compositing window manager (in my case: compiz-fusion) is responsible for the blur ability or the driver.
According to what I read in this thread, the compositing manager should be because the current ATI driver should be mature enough to handle this feature.
I already filed a bug for this in the past:https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479443
But this bug was closed by the bug maintainer with the following comment:
"Thanks for the report. We are sorry that we cannot help you with your problem, but we are not able to support binary-only drivers. If you would be able to reproduce this issue using only open source software, please, reopen this bug with the additional information, but in meantime I have no choice than to close
this bug as CANTFIX (because we really cannot fix it)."
To me, as a simple user, this feels like no-one is going to solve this.
Last edited by Mr_Ed; 03-07-2009 at 04:59 AM.
Senior Member
Blur windows _broke_ somewhere about 8.46. At that point, transparent windows got darkened instead of getting their background blurred. Focus blur seemed to work though IIRC.
Lateron, I guess about 8.11, blur still didn't work, but now it just didn't change anything about the window or its background. Turning on the plugin had the same effect as leaving it disabled (i.e. neither focus nor alpha blur worked).
About the usefullness of blurring transparent windows: It's quite practical in that way, that you can see if something changes in the "lower" windows (e.g. a new chat message) but at the same time the transparency doesn't make reading the text in the topmost window any harder.
Phoronix Member
I just tried the open source driver.
When I enable blur in compiz, it makes the windows lag like hell, moving a window takes about 5 seconds and traces of the background keep being visible in the window border after moving a window. Switching between windows (alt-tab) idem ditto. Everything works slow.
1. The "4xBilinear" blur does work.
2. Mipmap make the window borders dissapear.
2. Gaussian doesn't blur at all. And is slow too.
Google-Earth doesnt work with the open source driver.
When DPMS mode is enabled and the screen goes to sleep it will not wake up from it anymore.
Pretty much everything else I do with this driver is al least 50% slower then with the fglrx driver.
i.e. Watching a video on discovery it hicks like hell.
AMD Linux
For an fglrx bug, the place to file is http://ati.cchtml.com. Distros can fix bugs in open source drivers but not binary drivers, as they said.
If we're talking about the Compiz blur effect, I think there is already a ticket open on the fglrx tracker; at least now I know what it's talking about
AMD Linux
Sounds like the blur is being done in software, which would be very slow. If it's a GL 2.0 function being used in blur that would make sense; the open drivers should pick up GL 2.0 support once Gallium3D is up and running (Gallium3D was integrated into mesa master recently, which is *great* news).
For the other apps it also sounds like they are taking SW fallbacks; there's a way to disable that but I don't remember the details.
I need to talk to the Google folks; Google is such a big advocate of open source but it seems like they only test their apps on binary drivers, not open source
I'm not sure what the latest problem with Google Earth is; will ask around.
Is that a flash video or something ? I would expect video playback to be faster on the open drivers than on fglrx these days; this should be fixable today.
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