I've done direct tests comparing compositing to noncompositing desktops of otherwises similar "weight" on machines barely able to play 720P video. Both my netbook, which uses the Intel video driver, and a Pentium 4 2GHZ with Radeon 1650 (r500 driver) will play a 720p/30fps/H264 video without falling behind on a noncompositing environment.
On the Pentium 4 I compared Compiz in Mate to Marco (metacity fork) in Mate, and enabling compositing caused the CPU use to hit 100% and the video to fall behind the audio. Disable compositing, the CPU usage may barely touch 100%, usually between 85 to 95%, with the video keeping up. On the netbook 720P video playback in Icewm is flawless, in any compositing environment it is not. In the latter case memory bandwidth is a suspect, as graphics is on the chipset but the memory controller is on the CPU with one channel of RAM, a configuration I've never had good results with compositing on. All these cases are with direct ALSA sound. On multicore CPUs with discrete graphics this problem goes completely away, thus I use different DE's in different machines. On 08/28/2013 at 9:48 AM, "Ralf Mardorf" <ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net> wrote: > >On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 13:44 +0100, lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: >> I would NOT reconmend any compositing DE for a dual core or >> single-core machine used for any form of performance-critical >work >> like multitrack audio or video editing. > >This is one issue, while your assumption anyway is wrong, the other >issue is, that young GNOME forks like all relatively new and small, >unpaid projects need much longer observation than it was possible >to do >for Cinnamon, before it should be available as an alternate DE by >the >installer. I'm not only thinking about "in the last years I >experienced >e.g. Cinnamon as good or bad", but who are the folks from upstream, >what's their policy, e.g. will the project be continued in two >years >etc. pp., e.g. how does it interact with other installed software, >"Gnome-Control-Center has been forked. It is now called >Cinnamon-Control-Center and it combines Gnome-Control-Center and >Cinnamon-Settings" - Wiki. > >Even the compositing issue has _nothing_ to do with the CPU, it's a >graphics driver and/or kernel issue. Even when using Xfce4, but >with a >less good graphics driver, a transparent window doesn't cause a >serious >issue when using a vanilla kernel, just if you use a rt patched >vanilla >kernel, the performance for GUIs when using transparency, becomes >an >issue. You don't need a fast CPU, you even don't need a fast >graphics, >but you need a graphics driver that is good. Graphics drivers for >Linux >are a serious issue per se. > > > >-- >ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list >ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com >Modify settings or unsubscribe at: >https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
