On 26/03/2008, Chris Rowson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quick question. Does running Ubuntu with compositing enabled effect > the overall performance of the system? ... > Nvidia Geforce 440
Compositing will not noticeably affect system performance if you have a separate hardware 3D graphics card that supports full transparency in hardware. I think that any card that is compatible with DirectX7 [1] or above will support full transparency. All PCI, AGP and PCI-E Nvidia and ATI cards since around 1999 should support full transparency. Your Nvidia Geforce 440 does support full transparency in separate hardware and will run compositing very fast. I actually have the very same card on my Ubuntu Dapper machine at home, running Beryl, the precursor to Compiz Fusion that is used in Gutsy/Hardy. If you are using Compiz prior to Hardy Beta (eg. in Gutsy), you may need to tweak your xorg.conf video driver settings to prevent full-screen video running slowly/jerkily. Various solutions on ubuntuforums.org . Integrated 3D graphics chips, that are less than three years old, that use a mixture of hardware and software, and which are soldered to your motherboard, should be fine for most desktop use, but may slow considerably when you run full-screen video or full-screen 3D games, depending which version of which drivers you are using. For instance, until a recent driver update, my laptop with Intel X3100 i965 graphics ran full-screen video very jerkily and full-screen 3D games very slowly. The solution is to turn off Compiz before running full-screen video or 3D games; I did this by creating a separate video/gaming desktop account. Since the recent Intel driver update, though, full screen video works fine with compositing turned on in Hardy Beta. Integrated graphics chips which are older than 3 years, which use more software than hardware, will definitely see a slowdown and possibly, due to lack of transparency support, won't work at all. Similarly, any AGP/PCI 3D card prior to DirectX7 will probably, due to lack of transparency support, not work at all. -- Andrew Oakley [1] DirectX is a Microsoft 3D driver and has little to do with Linux/Ubuntu. I use this only as a useful measure of ascertaining hardware 3D features, when reading from the side of a box or from a list of features on a website, prior to purchase. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/