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2mac

Member

Registered: 2013-11-09

Posts: 95

Visual Lag in GNOME 3

I have the latest update of GNOME installed, and it appears to subtle (but annoying) frame lag occasionally. I use an Intel graphics card and intel-dri for my primary video (using Bumblebee for most games).

Much of the GNOME interface performs as expected, but it has its hiccups at times. Sometimes, using the upper-left hot corner for activities gives a half-second freeze. Other times, I notice the terminal doesn't draw very quickly (tested using mplayer to play an audio file, the seconds don't move very quickly as compared to using xterm in XFCE). Additionally, some games (Minecraft was my example) have unusual mouse movement issues. Framerate appears mostly steady, but in GNOME (tested against XFCE), the mouse might move a little farther than expected (it moves more pixels in one motion than it would otherwise with the same input).

With how well this card a driver perform on XFCE and games like Team Fortress 2 (couldn't get Bumblebee to work with it, but the framerate is quite high), I can't grasp what's causing these visual issues in GNOME.

What else could be causing this?

EDIT: The framerate in Minecraft actually does have a noticable drop, but it's inconsistent. Sometimes, it performs as expected. Other times, the frames are clearly visible. The game is playable, but irritating to play.

Last edited by 2mac (2014-01-06 23:38:33)

w201

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 289

Re: Visual Lag in GNOME 3

I'm experiencing the same thing on my desktop computer with a core i5 2400 and Radeon HD 6450. When I first boot up and I hover over the top left hotcorner, the lag is most noticable, as you say, about half a second. After that it performs normally. I'm just guessing, but I think in the first instance, the activities window in the top left corner isn't cached yet so it's slow, but it's fine after it gets loaded into RAM.

Gnome loves ram and a bottleneck for a lot of people these days is their platter drive. I've had a 500GB ssd drive on my wish list for quite some time now, which will probably boost performance considerably.

Steef435

Member

Registered: 2013-08-29

Posts: 577

Website

Re: Visual Lag in GNOME 3

The issue with the mouse might have something to do with mouse acceleration.

I'm not sure, but I believe drawing in terminals more comes down to the processor than to the graphics card.

Have you considered if Gnome is just too demanding for your hardware to run super smooth?

Last edited by Steef435 (2014-01-07 19:23:22)

2mac

Member

Registered: 2013-11-09

Posts: 95

Re: Visual Lag in GNOME 3

I have considered it. After using GNOME for a couple of days straight now, I'm starting to notice it a little less. However, with how well my hardware handles applications and environments of even heavier weight, it doesn't seem reasonable (to me) that my hardware isn't capable.

w201

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 289

Re: Visual Lag in GNOME 3

Something else you can try is a shell extension called Activities Configurator and adjust the hot corner threshold. Default is 100, so setting it to 90 will make the reaction time quicker.

syms

Member

Registered: 2008-12-25

Posts: 296

Re: Visual Lag in GNOME 3

I'm not sure if intel graphics has vsync on by default, but if it does, you could try to add this line in /etc/environment:
CLUTTER_VBLANK=none
This will basically disable vsync in gnome's compositing manager what has vastly improved performance both at desktop and at games at least for me with nvidia driver (of course if you don't mind tearing).