Unity 6.8 poor performance

**mc4man** · October 9th, 2012

In lieu of any real/useful 2d or 3d benchmarking I'd say unity/compiz has gotten slower based on real use experience, at least with nvidia & as supplied.
(glxgears is worthless, glxperf not far behind

**fjgaude** · October 9th, 2012

Originally Posted by mc4man

In lieu of any real/useful 2d or 3d benchmarking I'd say unity/compiz has gotten slower based on real use experience, at least with nvidia & as supplied.
(glxgears is worthless, glxperf not far behind

I think what we are observing is Ubuntu developers have ready access to Intel software and always make sure the updates work correctly and take advantage to what Intel is doing, improving.

My box is snappy, and getting better with each Intel upgrade. It's still Sandy Bridge, HD3000, but come the new year will upgrade to Ivy Bridge.

**jrog** · October 9th, 2012

Originally Posted by fjgaude

I think what we are observing is Ubuntu developers have ready access to Intel software and always make sure the updates work correctly and take advantage to what Intel is doing, improving.

My box is snappy, and getting better with each Intel upgrade. It's still Sandy Bridge, HD3000, but come the new year will upgrade to Ivy Bridge.

Same here, and I'm using Ivy Bridge (HD 4000).

**TenPlus1** · October 10th, 2012

Agreed, Intel seems to be improving in leaps and bounds with graphic speeds on the desktop where Nvidia/Amd work towards 3D performance for gaming...

My 10 year old Compaq m2000 laptop with Intel Extreme 2 graphics runs the desktop quicker than my 1 year old Acer Aspire using Nvidia Ion Rev.2...

**VMC** · October 10th, 2012

Originally Posted by mc4man

In lieu of any real/useful 2d or 3d benchmarking I'd say unity/compiz has gotten slower based on real use experience, at least with nvidia & as supplied.
(glxgears is worthless, glxperf not far behind

Same here. AMD + nvidia. that's why i removed compiz and all of its cousins and went back to gnome classic. Now its very snappy. I don't need any of that 3D effects.

**kyleabaker** · October 11th, 2012

I've got to agree with the other AMD & Nvidia users here. Unity is becoming more and more sluggish and frustrating to work with. Are Unity developers not testing anything other than Intel and assuming everything else is fine?

**mc4man** · October 11th, 2012

Originally Posted by kyleabaker

I've got to agree with the other AMD & Nvidia users here. Unity is becoming more and more sluggish and frustrating to work with. Are Unity developers not testing anything other than Intel and assuming everything else is fine?

I'd think it's known, will likely take time to address
(& by then there will be more changes, additions so more 'items' to address. - one step forward, half (or more) step back

A quick search of just compiz - tag performance shows 17 new
https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+b...ag=performance
Some more with tag gdebugger
https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+b....tag=gdebugger

Also am noticing some new issues with nouveau, maybe kernel related but in any event will add to user problems as user base increases

It's also well known how bad llvmpipe is going to be for most hardware requiring - the changelog for current compiz pretty much says so though "slow ui" is likely an understatement

* debian/patches/unity_support_test.patch:
- force llvmpipe in the unity profile if we are in the grey zone, meaning:
the card and drivers have opengl support, however, it doesn't met unity
requirements (opengl < 1.4, no vertex shaders support…). Thanks duflu
(LP: #1039155)
Note that we already discourage them to upgrade from precise to quantal
with a warning before the upgrade, however let's get a slow ui rather
than none on the iso as well.

**Welly Wu** · October 13th, 2012

I have the Intel Core i5-3210M with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and Ubuntu Unity 6.8.0 is faster than in Ubuntu 12.04.1 64 bit LTS.

**fjgaude** · October 13th, 2012

Originally Posted by Welly Wu

I have the Intel Core i5-3210M with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and Ubuntu Unity 6.8.0 is faster than in Ubuntu 12.04.1 64 bit LTS.

Same here, but with HD3000 and Intel i5-2405S, a very low power CPU but still fast when it called to action.

**screaminj3sus** · October 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by fjgaude

I think what we are observing is Ubuntu developers have ready access to Intel software and always make sure the updates work correctly and take advantage to what Intel is doing, improving.

My box is snappy, and getting better with each Intel upgrade. It's still Sandy Bridge, HD3000, but come the new year will upgrade to Ivy Bridge.

I have intel ironlake (one generation before sandybridge). The unity dash is *incredibly* slow in both 12.04 and 12.10. Doing things like dragging an icon from dash to launcher is super laggy, if I open the dash when I have a video playing the dash takes forever to open and is super laggy (can see the icons all VERY slowly loading in) its pretty ridiculous. The same chip runs gnome-shell totally smoothly, and even kwin (with kwin's active blur too).

Every since they introduced blur in the dash its been like this, its very poorly optimized. Kwin's active blur has no such performance hit. Of course you can disable the blur, but that makes the dash unreadable, and static blur is just ugly :/. I really like unity, but they need to speed up the dash, a lot.