Unity 6.8 poor performance

**janderson91z** · October 9th, 2012

Hi, I'm playing around with the 12.10 on my Q6600 OC'd to 3.0ghz and I've noticed that Unity is really sluggish. Now I know my CPU is getting a little long in the tooth but it shouldn't have problems with Ubuntu. I thought Unity 6.8 was supposed to increase performance? Would installing the AMD proprietary drivers help anything? Thanks.

**sacridex** · October 9th, 2012

First of all, the Unity performance does NOT depend on your CPU.
What GPU do you have?

**janderson91z** · October 9th, 2012

Amd 4850

**TenPlus1** · October 9th, 2012

Replacing the open-source radeon drivers with the proprietary one's should make a big difference in speed...

**VinDSL** · October 9th, 2012

You might find this thread illuminating...

LINKAGE: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2064664

**philinux** · October 9th, 2012

On my acer aspire 1410 I get 20 seconds from gtkperf using 100 test rounds.

How does this compare.

**exploder** · October 9th, 2012

Unity itself seems a little slower but applications like games seem to run much better. I am using the proprietary ATI drivers on an HP DV6 laptop.

**DisappearingOak** · October 9th, 2012

I'm on Ubuntu's Gnome Shell with open source drivers on Radeon 4250, and it can be a little sluggish at some places as well. Could this be related as Unity is based on the same code?
On 100 rounds I get this:

Code:

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Tue Oct  9 18:30:35 2012

GtkEntry - time:  0.07
GtkComboBox - time:  1.28
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  1.01
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.18
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.20
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.26
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.09
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.09
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  0.11
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  0.17
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  1.04
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  0.79
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  0.46
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.23
 --- 
Total time:  5.96

no idea what this means though.

**fjgaude** · October 9th, 2012

Originally Posted by VinDSL

You might find this thread illuminating...

LINKAGE: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2064664

On my Intel based box, see signature, I get using gtkperf 3.1 with the default OpenGL CCSM setting on 12.10; 4.6 on 12.04. Removing the default settings, gtkperf is 2.89 on 12.10. (Didn't test for 12.04.)

I would say Unity keeps getting quicker, at least with Intel video graphics.

**godhika** · October 9th, 2012

Originally Posted by DisappearingOak

Could this be related as Unity is based on the same code?

This has not been true for quite a while now. Only in it's very first incarnation Unity used to be a Mutter plugin (like Gnome-shell is still today). Unity is now (well for a few cycles in fact) a Compiz plugin.