Re: Applications Compatibility

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

First of all, Mutter is not the shell. Performance issues may be in either Clutter/Cogl, Mutter, or the Shell/St, all things that didn't exist under gnome2.

Mutter is now a library, but because of hysterical raisins, it also has its own base WM that's extremely similar to metacity. If you're running F15, try 'mutter --replace' and see if your performance problems persist. It could very well be a performance problem existing in Shell, but not in Mutter... so, try there.

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:20 AM, jordan <triplesquarednine gmail com> wrote:

> I've had the opposite experience.  With compiz and multi-head (second
> display) acceleration usually got disabled and was at best hit-n-miss.

I have 2 displays and am running compiz 0.9.5 (with nvidia), no
problems at all - full hardware acceleration. Even with 0.8.6 running
2 displays, i didn't have any real issues.

> GNOME3 is now working with a second display [not in fail-over mode]
> which is much appreciated.  For me GNOME3's OpenGL based shell seems
> both faster and more robust than compiz + GNOME2.

and what sort of heavy-duty 3D applications are you actually using
with your setup?   You know, the kinds of applications that can turn
compositors on their head?  ie: gaming, transgaming, 3d animation,
etc...

faster? - it's not... you can't even reduce/increase the speed of your
effects with the click of a mouse. the defaults for transitions in
gnome-shell have slow timing - smooth yes, but slow moving from start
to finish time.... so what exactly are you basing this on??? -
possibly biased benchmarks made by developers, who clearly want people
to use Mutter/gnome-shell and not compiz? your own eyes?? (in which
case, you have no way of being able to tell the difference, as you
probably can't stress mutter, and test against compiz - frame for
frame).

OK, there's two things that people mean when they say "fast" or "slow", and I want to know which one you're thinking of.

Do the designed effects look smooth, but take too long to complete in your mind? That's a design and UX issue, not at all a performance issue. With a little hackery, you can see if this helps it a bit.

Alt+F2 'lg' to open the Looking Glass, and paste in:

  St.set_slow_down_factor(0.5)

This is a developer tool to make animations slower for debugging cases where they don't look right, but it's hard to see, but in your case it can make animations faster. It will go away when you restart the shell... you can make an extension that will run some code like this every time you start the shell... or maybe it's worth making a gsetting for gnome-tweak-tool to pick up (it's not a hard patch).


If the animations and effects look choppy, that's a performance issue, and I truly apologize if you've experienced anything in the transitions like that.
 

more robust? - if that was true --> then in any and all circumstances
gnome-shell/mutter should have zero tearing, zero graphical errors, in
situations that would break compiz. If you had read my comments to
Allen, you would have noticed i gave examples as to where
gnome-shell/mutter was anything BUT robust. One trip to youtube and
watching gnome-shell reviews will show you that it isn't as robust as
you think. You've (im assuming) even saw my screenshots from Maya
(that i posted a month or so ago on the list). Compiz handles all this
stuff fine, gnome-shell/mutter does not.... I'm not saying it's not
going to get there, it probably will - but it ain't there yet.

I'm sorry. I haven't read up on many of your previous emails, and I've probably asked this again before, but can you give some hardware and driver details?
I read you are running "on nvidia": what card or chipset, and I assume you're running on the proprietary drivers here.

For something as simple as screen tearing, there's actually a lot of complicated factors going into play here.
 

Also, Mutter doesn't even have much to compare with Compiz. I haven't
seen mutter produce even a fraction of types of
transitions/plugins/GFX that compiz can. When Mutter starts doing more
complicated types of effects (like 3D, not just scale/zoom) we will
see how it performs then. until you can speed up the effects, and
there are more hardcore transitions/effetcs to equally compare - i
think it's pretty hard to compare mutter to anything but metacity, or
possibly cairo-compmgr.

Both the Shell and Mutter are based on Clutter, which is OpenGL and has pretty much supported 3D from day one.

Don't believe me? Alt+F2 'lg' to open the Looking Glass, and paste in:

  global.get_window_actors().forEach(function(a) { a.rotation_angle_y = a.rotation_angle_x = 5; });

To reset:

  global.get_window_actors().forEach(function(a) { a.rotation_angle_y = a.rotation_angle_x = 0; });

Feel free to try out something maybe a little more stressful:

  Mainloop.timeout_add(1000/24, function() { global.get_window_actors().forEach(function(a) { a.rotation_angle_y += 1; }); return true; });

You can remove it with:

  Mainloop.source_remove(it); global.get_window_actors().forEach(function(a) { a.rotation_angle_y = 0; });

You may notice that mouse events aren't working right: I'm not sure if we can do this sort of transformation "in realtime" because of X limitations. Someone like ebassi may be able to shed some light here, I'm still trying to learn these things :)

Additionally, all of the 3D effects that I've mentioned don't have a lot of time spent on them because the design hasn't called for it, but it is possible.

fail-over mode..? lol.

fallback is what has kept gnome on my desktops (and many other users),
i would hardly associate that with "failure".  it potentially means,
down-the-line if gnome-shell gets to be more to my liking (or other
people who aren't using it with gnome3) ~ we won't have already moved
on to something like KDE, and completely ditched gnome! ~ that to me,
means fallback mode is a "success", and a good thing.

Performance probably isn't what we'd have liked it to be in 3.0, and we hope it can get better for 3.2.
 

jordan

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