GNOME Shell Hurts Gaming Performance

An anonymous reader writes "According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux. Using Unity and GNOME Shell are also hitting various bugs in the open-source drivers."

It also mentions KWin.

[SanityInAnarchy]

...and I have noticed some weirdness here. It seems like KWin disables desktop effects on fullscreen windows, yet disabling them entirely (there's a hotkey to toggle it) has a huge impact on the performance of most things (like games) that use the GPU.

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Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[MrNemesis]

Amen, I'm not sure why people don't see the connection. At times I feel like the only guy on the planet who immediately disables all this compositor nonsense the second I get a new machine/profile - and it's got nothing to do with gaming (although it causing video playback failure under linux is simply inexcusable). Apart from everyone else in my house who saw my laptop and said "how did you get it to stop doing all that stupid swooshing stuff?" and duly went through a customisation binge, swiftly followed by a "wow, it's so much faster now!".

3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place (other than "We don't have as much eye candy as apple yet"). All this talk of freeing up the CPU seems bogus as well, as long as 2D acceleration works fine I've never seen any WM/DE chew significant cycles drawing widgets. Composited desktops however result in higher aggregate power usage for me at least (tried on both an intel 4500 and a low-end nVidia under linux), seemingly all for the sake of squidging up a window when it's minimised and giving me a rotating cube instead of alt tab. I guess I'm just old an inherently old fashioned in that I even use win7 in a theme as close to windows 2000 as I can get (except it's greyer). All that fast-moving whizz bang stuff is just horribly distracting to me. Perhaps someone can explain what I'm missing?

Maybe in a CPU generation or two when we get an on-CPU framebuffer and decent drivers across all OS's and WM/DE designers will show a bit more restraint and tact, but the trend certainly seems to be to spend more and more resources on making Joe Sixpack's netbook resemble something from Hackers. I'm not against giving people a choice, by all means keep your flashy bling if you love it so much, but making it the default and impossible to turn off? Stupid. I think Gnome must have had a frontal lobotomy to think that mandating composition, and hence wholly bug-free drivers for 3D graphics cards in linux, was a good idea - in all my ten years of using it on the desktop I've never encountered a wholly bug-free driver. Same goes for windows for that matter.

</rant>