Re: Performance (was Re: control-center 2.13.90 released)

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 21:05 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > I switched back from Clearlooks cairo version to the Mist theme:
> > everything is nice and fast now. With cairo-clearlooks, clicking a
> > cleared number in gnome-mines, I could follow the bombsquad clearing the
> > field of known not-mine squares. With Mist, these fields get uncovered
> > instantly.
> >   
> 
> Actually, Mist is already using cairo, so your test only shows that Mist 
> is a faster theme than Clearlooks. This was hopefully already known, 
> since Mist is a lot simpler than Clearlooks. One of the biggest problems 
> for Clearlooks in terms of speed, is it's use of gradients, and that has 
> always been an issue whether it has used GDK or cairo. To get a 
> definitive answer, we need people to test is the difference between 
> using Clearlooks with cairo (gtk-engines 2.7.x) and with GDK 
> (gtk-engines 2.6.x).
> 
> -Thomas

Actually, together with switching to Mist, I also switched back to the
old GDK version of gtk-engines. I will try some tests with gtk-engines
2.7.x tomorrow to see if there's a noticable speed difference.

For the clearlooks themes with cairo: having a card that does RENDER
accelleration can speed up quite a lot. Switching from a Matrox G550 to
a Radeon 8500LE really shows good results for cairo. But I guess we
should also think about those people who still have hardware that does
not support render accelleration that much (I have X terminals with 4MB
Matrox Millennium cards in them, they're terrible slow since the switch
to GTK 2.8)