gnome3 / xorg performance

walterjwhite · 2011-06-20 14:47:40

Hi all,

I am getting really poor performance with gnome 3 shell. Compiz ran much faster when I had it setup on this machine and metacity by itself was still a little bit quicker than compiz (less graphical effects).

Is gnome 3 shell half as fast as compiz for you guys or is my configuration less than optimal?

Thanks,

Walter

triplesquarednine · 2011-06-20 14:59:56

walterjwhite wrote:

Hi all,
I am getting really poor performance with gnome 3 shell. Compiz ran much faster when I had it setup on this machine and metacity by itself was still a little bit quicker than compiz (less graphical effects).
Is gnome 3 shell half as fast as compiz for you guys or is my configuration less than optimal?

Thanks,
Walter

it would be hard for anyone to comment on your configuration, without knowing what hardware (graphics card) you have, and more info about your setup in general..

gnome-Shell works great for some people and not so much for others. there are other threads here in the forum on performance problems related to gnome-shell, you might want to have a look around. for some people the proprietary drivers (ATI/Nvidia) have problems, while the open-source drivers work great. - while for other people the proprietary drivers are fast and work great. some people with Intel also have good performace, while others can't even use gnome-shell, because it is that slow.

i know for myself, while gnome-shell works 'okay' (although, it used to not work well at alll!) with my main desktop, using Nvidia - compiz works better, so i have opted to not use gnome-shell, for a variety of other reasons as well. (mainly key design concepts, to do with workflow that i completely disagree with).

anyway, you might want to post more information on your setup and get a little bit more specific - so people can have a better idea of what may be going on. also, keep in mind that if you can't get Gnome-Shell to work well, but still want to use gnome3 - you could use it with compiz, and if you don't want to use compiz, you can always use it with mutter (metacity's successer).

take care

Last edited by triplesquarednine (2011-06-20 15:01:06)

wonder · 2011-06-20 15:13:55

lets talk about performance but not mention a word about what driver do you use

walterjwhite · 2011-06-20 15:15:04

I am using the nvidia driver.

Walter

wonder · 2011-06-20 15:16:20

walterjwhite wrote:

I am using the nvidia driver.

Walter

ok, that's problem. nvidia is broken with gnome-shell. just try for a bit gnome-shell running nouveau and watch it flyyyyyyyy.

walterjwhite · 2011-06-20 15:33:39

Ok, I will give it a try.

Thanks,

Walter

walterjwhite · 2011-06-20 15:55:59

It looks like it addressed a few bugs, I will keey you posted if this improves overall performance. The last time I tried nouvau was several months ago with Fedora. It seemed really slow with gnome 3 so I was hesitant to try it. It seems like it runs much better now.

Walter

triplesquarednine · 2011-06-20 16:21:47

wonder wrote:

walterjwhite wrote:
I am using the nvidia driver.

Walter
ok, that's problem. nvidia is broken with gnome-shell. just try for a bit gnome-shell running nouveau and watch it flyyyyyyyy.

'watch it fly' until you require any 'real' 3D acceleration, in which case you can expect it to be 2-3x slower than the Nvidia proprietary driver

so, nouveau is only a good choice for general desktop use, anything beyond that - the driver isn't very good at all.

it's a big problem for anyone who owns nvidia hardware, and wants to use their card, how it was designed to be used...

Lone_Wolf · 2011-06-20 17:04:49

triplesquarednine wrote:

'watch it fly' until you require any 'real' 3D acceleration, in which case you can expect it to be 2-3x slower than the Nvidia proprietary driver
so, nouveau is only a good choice for general desktop use, anything beyond that - the driver isn't very good at all.
it's a big problem for anyone who owns nvidia hardware, and wants to use their card, how it was designed to be used...

Blame nvidia for that, they have done very little for the open source driver recently.

triplesquarednine · 2011-06-20 17:21:51

Lone_Wolf wrote:

triplesquarednine wrote:
'watch it fly' until you require any 'real' 3D acceleration, in which case you can expect it to be 2-3x slower than the Nvidia proprietary driver
so, nouveau is only a good choice for general desktop use, anything beyond that - the driver isn't very good at all.
it's a big problem for anyone who owns nvidia hardware, and wants to use their card, how it was designed to be used...
Blame nvidia for that, they have done very little for the open source driver recently.

I'm not blaming anyone, i was just stating a fact

blaming them, is counter-productive and the fact of the matter is Nvidia already produce a driver that is much much better than nouveau. if there is any blame to be laid down, it would be on the Mutter/gnome-shell developers who have failed to make their compositing/shell work properly with Nvidia (ie: kwin, compiz, e17's compositing work just fine, even cairo-compmgr works smoothly with the proprietary driver)...

but i don't blame anyone, it is what it is...

I just wanted to point out, that if you need good 3D acceleration, nouveau will not give you any, relative to the binary driver. On top of that, without patching mutter, you have to wait until 3.2 release before you can have the option of 'unredirect' on fullscreen apps, so gnome-shell (currently) isn't the best environment for running 3D intensive applications in the first place.

Last edited by triplesquarednine (2011-06-20 17:37:51)

bwat47 · 2011-06-20 19:09:13

I experience the opposite. For me gnome-shell is much smoother than compiz or kwin. (intel graphics)

triplesquarednine · 2011-06-20 19:47:28

bwat47 wrote:

I experience the opposite. For me gnome-shell is much smoother than compiz or kwin. (intel graphics)

Walter (the person who started the thread) is using Nvidia, not intel.

kennyd · 2011-06-20 19:49:35

strangely gnome-shell flies for me on the proprietary nvidia driver but is really slow on nouveau!

Viper_Scull · 2011-06-20 21:53:52

Intel here. Hd3000 from a SB. Compiz ran faster with worst cards (ex. ATI HD4200 + FOSS). A bit dissapointed.

Last edited by Viper_Scull (2011-06-20 21:54:42)

bwat47 · 2011-06-20 22:08:29

triplesquarednine wrote:

bwat47 wrote:
I experience the opposite. For me gnome-shell is much smoother than compiz or kwin. (intel graphics)
Walter (the person who started the thread) is using Nvidia, not intel.

Yeah, it wasn't in his original post and I ended up scrolling past the post where he mentioned his driver.

Viper_Scull wrote:

Intel here. Hd3000 from a SB. Compiz ran faster with worst cards (ex. ATI HD4200 + FOSS). A bit dissapointed.

Intel has come out with a new acceleration architecture that is supposed to really speed things up. No idea when it will show up in arch/mesa though. My intel chip is Ironlake (one generation before yours) and it's a mobile processor and it runs both compiz and gnome-shell great. Its most likely driver support for sandybridge just isn't all the way there yet.

Last edited by bwat47 (2011-06-20 22:15:06)

Viper_Scull · 2011-06-20 22:24:31

bwat47 wrote:

Intel has come out with a new acceleration architecture that is supposed to really speed things up. No idea when it will show up in arch/mesa though. My intel chip is Ironlake (one generation before yours) and it's a mobile processor and it runs both compiz and gnome-shell great. Its most likely driver support for sandybridge just isn't all the way there yet.

I read about it in Phoronix (SNA architecture). No comment about dates though. We could wait for a year before see anything coming to us on this matter.

walterjwhite · 2011-06-20 23:58:59

Hi all,

I tried nouveau again on my personal laptop and it runs slower. At home, I am running a dual display so that might be why. Whenever I drag windows, the UI lags quite a bit. I guess I'll run nvidia at home and nouveau at work.

Walter

ScionicSpectre · 2011-06-25 15:44:21

The Intel cards will likely run better anyway, considering the fact that Intel develops Clutter and the open source drivers for Intel GPUs. I would expect any updated driver for Intel not working well with gnome-shell would be a very serious matter for them.

Nouveau has come a long ways in a short amount of time, but it definitely has rough edges and a lot of improvements left to go. I'd suggest waiting until the official drivers from ATi and NVIDIA have improved support for Clutter and gnome-shell, either from developers on our side or the manufacturers themselves. I doubt it will be long before the situation is improved, as GNOME 3 crops up 'officially' in a variety of distributions.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-06-20 14:47:40

gnome3 / xorg performance

#2 2011-06-20 14:59:56

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#3 2011-06-20 15:13:55

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#4 2011-06-20 15:15:04

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#5 2011-06-20 15:16:20

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#6 2011-06-20 15:33:39

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#7 2011-06-20 15:55:59

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#8 2011-06-20 16:21:47

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#9 2011-06-20 17:04:49

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#10 2011-06-20 17:21:51

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#11 2011-06-20 19:09:13

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#12 2011-06-20 19:47:28

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#13 2011-06-20 19:49:35

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#14 2011-06-20 21:53:52

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#15 2011-06-20 22:08:29

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#16 2011-06-20 22:24:31

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#17 2011-06-20 23:58:59

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

#18 2011-06-25 15:44:21

Re: gnome3 / xorg performance

Board footer