The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by anselm
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

2D still tends to use less power than 3D desktop though. Which means it's certainly still being implemented efficiently in hardware.

But hey, who wants longer battery hardware? Look at the shiny...

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (3 responses)

That's not true. When Clutter is rendering animations, it actively throttles itself to avoid drawing faster than the VSync rate of the monitor to save power and avoid visual tearing. When Clutter is idle, the graphics hardware is completely idle. So since we're avoiding CPU-intensive expose events with a compositor, you actually likely have a net power savings, at least with Intel graphics. AMD and NVidia haven't yet managed to idle low enough and so they are frequently tied to an Intel graphics implementation. On proprietary OS's, if a game is not running, the Intel graphics are used. (We cannot do this in Linux, yet. Though it is on the horizon.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Compiz with GNOME2 certainly used more power than normal metacity on my intel graphics laptop. I'm glad to hear that clutter tries to make efficient use of the hardware.

For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:59 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Yes, that is what you should find. It's likely to be very close but a good test is a bunch of open windows and then dragging one window around the desktop rapidly.

> Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

Mm... I thought I was up to date on this but perhaps you know more than I do. My understanding until now has been that dynamic graphics switching requires the same Gallium state tracker in both drivers since the entire hardware state has to be moved from one graphics card to the other. Perhaps this is the milestone that has been reached to which you are referring?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:03 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

I've only got login/out switch working,

dynamic switching where it powers up/down the second GPU for running games is something I'm playing with now.

Complete switch at runtime for all X apps is also on the list but harder.