[ubuntu-studio-devel] New for saucy

[lukefromdc at hushmail.com]

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.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
>
>On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 13:44 +0100, lukefromdc at 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.
>
>
>
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