Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 22:30 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME? by sebas
Parent article: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

> Are there fallback options for those that cannot or do not want to use compositing?

Probably OpenBox. Which is my current fallback when I get tired of Metacity's McHappyMeal-ness.

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As far as hardware goes.. At the current time; All ATI cards since the R200-days should be 'ok' for handling compositing desktops. Similar for Nvidia, as long as they are supported by the proprietary drivers.

You won't be able to do it with the Intel 8xx series chipsets which some got sold with the Pentium-M era laptops. The 915 and 910 Intel chipsets can barely do it comfortably. But with modern UXA/GEM/setup anything 945g and newer should have zero problems managing a compositing desktop. The performance hit from running something like 'compiz' is negligable.. and as the drivers support for acceleration improves (like getting rid of needing software rendering for any part of EXA or whatnot) then performance should only get better.

I am running a Dell Mini-9 with 1.6ghz Atom and 1GB of RAM and it uses the 945g-era video chipset. It can run OpenGL composition quite well.. Well relatively well.

Mind you this is Fedora 11 beta with latest-and-greatest-everything. It took a while for Fedora 11 folks to get the drivers beaten into a good enough shape that performance is decent enough. It seems like the Ubuntu 9.04 folks missed the boat a bit with that one, but I am not sure.

The only problems I have are when watching large flash video. If you use UXA and then force Adobe's Flash to use OpenGL* then on the Mini-9 you can play Hulu.com videos well if the video is not maximized.

*
~]# cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
WindowlessDisable=true # a little bit more stable
OverrideGPUValidation=true # a nice performance boost

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Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 5:02 UTC (Sat) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (3 responses)

> The performance hit from running something like 'compiz' is negligable..

In my experience, on a laptop with GM45 Intel graphics (less than a year old), running compiz results in a significant performance hit for OpenGL applications (Google Earth, in particular, becomes unusably slow) -- and besides, every combination of compiz+mesa versions that I've tried over the past 6 months causes random X lockups, unsuspend problems, and so forth.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 11:25 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

These are just bugs that needs to be filed and fixed. Working around them is not a long term solution.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted May 3, 2009 12:30 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

which is what the KDE developers said when they released 4.0 - and the
result was an amount of shit which, if it were real, would cover the US.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 20:38 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

There is a bug with how Linux does it's CPU speed scaling. For some reason it won't scale the cpu up to make graphics run faster.

If you set the cpu speed at maximum or choose the 'performance' governer then it will make things quite a bit faster. For example in ManiaDrive I average around 50-70fps with my cpu at 800mhz and 150-190 when its at 2.0ghz.

However even with that your still going to see some performance drop. Like I said the only thing that I've found that works well so far is Fedora 11 beta... and even then it took quite a bit of time before they got it working well. As the new code paths mature I have no doubt that they will be able to exceed the capabilities of the old versions of the drivers.. especially when the drivers gain more capabilities.

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The trade off here is that with a composited desktop OpenGL applications prior to UXA/GEM/DRI2/etc was completely unusable...