Ubuntu Unity Proves Very Slow To KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE

[ruinairas]

Unity on AMD FX 4100 feels sluggish compared to even Windows.

As much as I don't want to believe it. Unity is by far slower than Windows. It also takes forever to boot. There seems to be something hanging between login and logout that takes about 60 seconds to get passed it. The unity panel itself lags when scrolling up and down the menus and the dash menu has a big delay when opening. It feels like Windows 7 when you got infected with a bunch of malware 0_o

[mrugiero]

As much as I don't want to believe it. Unity is by far slower than Windows. It also takes forever to boot. There seems to be something hanging between login and logout that takes about 60 seconds to get passed it. The unity panel itself lags when scrolling up and down the menus and the dash menu has a big delay when opening. It feels like Windows 7 when you got infected with a bunch of malware 0_o

Ubuntu and Unity aren't the same thing.

[LinuxAffenMann]

"Ubuntu Unity Proves Very Slow To KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE" - in games and synthetic benchmarks, OH NOES!

#lol@article

[bug77]

Normally, a window writes into an offscreen framebuffer of the size of the window, which is later copied onto the screen at the position of the window. If the compositor can properly detect a fullscreen window, it can skip the copying and render to the screen directly. It's only the copying that makes the difference.

Ok, that somewhat resembles double buffering (except that this time it's per window). But if the WM only has to draw one "window" and then copy it to screen, is that enough to explain the rather sizeable gap in Michael's graphs?

[molecule-eye]

Unity's no good

Interesting results, especially KWin fullscreen compositing vs fullscreen suspended. Compare this with the Phoronix results published earlier showing that with the Catalyst drivers give the same performance, fullscreen compositing enabled or not. What does this say about the Catalyst and Intel drivers? I guess performance should be the same whether or not compositing is enabled, non?

[Hamish Wilson]

That's not how it works. Only the full screen window and windows beneath it lose the composition and it doesn't seem to affect the other screen at all. I'm doing that all the time because the only way I can get tear free video on my external monior is by using MPlayer without compositing with VDPAU output . I'm not sure how it affects performance though.

That is how it has been working for me with the Xfce compositor and suspending full screen windows, although since I have my dual head setup using Zaphod Mode so that I do not need to be bothered when a game changes my screen resolution, each monitor is treated as a separate screen in my case.

As much as I don't want to believe it. Unity is by far slower than Windows. It also takes forever to boot. There seems to be something hanging between login and logout that takes about 60 seconds to get passed it. The unity panel itself lags when scrolling up and down the menus and the dash menu has a big delay when opening. It feels like Windows 7 when you got infected with a bunch of malware 0_o

Yes, nobody said that you can not make a crap desktop on either Windows or Linux. Microsoft got Aero to work in the end - Ubuntu still has not gotten Unity to.

[marek]

Ok, that somewhat resembles double buffering (except that this time it's per window). But if the WM only has to draw one "window" and then copy it to screen, is that enough to explain the rather sizeable gap in Michael's graphs?

It can explain some of it, but not all of it. There's also the (hopefully just CPU) overhead of the compositing manager itself.

[liam]

Normally, a window writes into an offscreen framebuffer of the size of the window, which is later copied onto the screen at the position of the window. If the compositor can properly detect a fullscreen window, it can skip the copying and render to the screen directly. It's only the copying that makes the difference.

Um, maybe this is naive but why wouldnt it always un-redirect when offscreen FB=screen size?

[bachinchi]

Kwin FTW

I love the screencap of the new Ubuntu login session scrolling right off the screen. I'm serious when I say: I don't think they test this stuff.

So can we conclude that Cinnamon would be similar to GNOME Shell in terms of performance?

I would say yes. But since Cinnamon uses a fork of Mutter (Muffin) ne can't be completely sure about it.

I'm eager to know what happens when using other hardware (and driver) combinations.

[Rigaldo]

Interesting results, especially KWin fullscreen compositing vs fullscreen suspended. Compare this with the Phoronix results published earlier showing that with the Catalyst drivers give the same performance, fullscreen compositing enabled or not. What does this say about the Catalyst and Intel drivers? I guess performance should be the same whether or not compositing is enabled, non?

I don't know if there were previous benchmarks with fullscreen effect suspend both on and off(I don't remember any), but as far as I know compositing is normal to affect performance since it requires extra work from the hardware(actually I think there's comments about this and how it works in this thread here too ..!).