Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce

It is going on a year since showing how Unity, Compiz, GNOME Shell & KWin affect graphics/gaming performance, so here is an updated 2012 look. In this article are a variety of OpenGL benchmarks run under the current latest desktops as will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce. AMD and NVIDIA graphics were tested with both the latest closed and open-source drivers.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17046

[d2kx]

The compiz version in Ubuntu 12.04 is still the old 5 month old build from September 2011, that is also included with Ubuntu 11.10. The new release with about 10 or so important performance fixes from Daniel Van Vugt and more should be included shortly before Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1. Also, some remaining Unity performance issues also have patches ready to go upstream very shortly. So the Unity (+ Compiz) Performance will go up quite a bit before Ubuntu 12.04 releases.

[cl333r]

@author of benchmarks
please don't use similar colors! really.

I have a hard time distinguishing between Unity2D and Xfce cause they're both dark red.

[benmoran]

Wow, Gnome Shell is doing pretty damn good. Looks like it's second only to XFCE in most of the tests, which I kind of expected. I expected that Gnome Classic would be faster than Shell, but surprisingly not.

[ChrisXY]

KDE with or without compositing? I guess, with?

[LinuxID10T]

Wow, Gnome Shell is doing pretty damn good. Looks like it's second only to XFCE in most of the tests, which I kind of expected. I expected that Gnome Classic would be faster than Shell, but surprisingly not.

It used to be pretty damn awful, so that is a good thing. Also, I think they tested Gnome Classic WITH compositioning rather than without.

[16050]

Very good comparison. Since a few weeks I asked myself how to modify up my low-cost system so that it runs World of Padman as fast as possible. Now I know.
Thank you!

[Bruners]

Why isn't LXDE considered? My only guess is that it's not complete enough on it's own.

[perpetualrabbit]

There must be some external reason that the performance under catalyst is that uniform across so many tests and so many different desktops. I think it must be that the limitation is some vsync setting, or some other limit other than the performance of those desktops. Remove that limit, and I think the results will change a lot.

[schmidtbag]

Why isn't LXDE considered? My only guess is that it's not complete enough on it's own.

i was wondering the same thing. personally i like lxde (i'm using it right now) and i found it to be noticeably faster than xfce. i personally hate xfce, i'd rather use unity. back before the gnome 3 days, xfce was just about as heavy as gnome 2, but offered less features and yet it strived to be lightweight.

lxde is the only true lightweight DE. sure its missing a lot of features but i like that because it doesn't force you to install a ton of gnome or kde packages and it only runs the minimal.