Compiz needs to play nicely with others

**Prosthetic Head** · June 2nd, 2008

Compiz needs to be made to stop interfeating with other OpenGL apps if it is to be on by default IMHO.
It currently makes other OpenGL apps run slowly, show artefacts and crash on my nVidia system. It also interfears with full screen mode on some apps which arn't using OpenGL (eg wesnoth)
I'm not sure what the problem is, but i think it neeeds to be fixed.
Thanks

**Ashrael** · June 2nd, 2008

I do agree.. I think it should turn itself off when i start a 3d game, no need for desktop effects when i am gaming...
But I do not think you should post this here... compiz-fusion.org seems to be the place

Greetz

**23meg** · June 2nd, 2008

Keyword: DRI2.

**Luke has no name** · June 2nd, 2008

Originally Posted by 23meg

Keyword: DRI2.

Is that a replacement for Compiz? A module? Something different?

I googled a little but didn't fine a clear explanation.

OP: Yes, Compiz should not be active by default if it messes up other applications!

**23meg** · June 3rd, 2008

DRI stands for Direct Rendering Infrastructure, and DRI2 is the recent rewrite of that component which fixes some (otherwise unfixable) problems with video overlays and OpenGL.

More info: http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2008/0...dri2-work.html

**RAOF** · June 3rd, 2008

Originally Posted by Prosthetic Head

...
It currently makes other OpenGL apps run slowly, show artefacts and crash on my nVidia system. It also interfears with full screen mode on some apps which arn't using OpenGL (eg wesnoth)
I'm not sure what the problem is, but i think it neeeds to be fixed.
Thanks

I don't see these problem on my nvidia system, and I've been playing plenty of games with Compiz, both in wine and natively. If it's not some unrelated problem it'll be a problem in the nvidia drivers. Compiz has plenty of bugs, but it exposes many, many more driver bugs than it has itself

.

Originally Posted by Ashrael

I do agree.. I think it should turn itself off when i start a 3d game, no need for desktop effects when i am gaming...
...

Welcome to the wonderful world of "unredirect fullscreen windows", aka "Don't composite fullscreen windows". Available in System->Preferences->Advanced Desktop Effects (Core options). I'm not sure if that's on by default now, but it used to expose a bug in gnome-screensaver's screen locking technique, so it might not be.

Originally Posted by Luke has no name

Is that a replacement for Compiz? A module? Something different?
...

DRI2 is the replacement Direct Rendering Interface protocol (In simple terms: how X drivers can talk directly to the video card). DRI2 basically makes it possible to fix all the X/driver limitations we currently have. It's not quite the same as 'redirected direct rendering', but it's a part of the implementation.

**| MM |** · June 3rd, 2008

Metacity is still the best option for me in a number of cases.

Smooth scroll in both Firefox and Opera is much smoother in metacity. In compiz its jerky. Flash is not OpenGL hardware accellerated in Compiz while it is in metacity. ANd Google Earth is pretty much always smooth in metacity, while in Compiz its quite spluttery.

SO yes, compiz does need to play nicer/better with some apps in some cases. But i fear that even with Xserver changes like DRi2, we will still be waiting on gfx card vendors (nvidia in my case) to update their binary drivers.

**RAOF** · June 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by | MM |

Metacity is still the best option for me in a number of cases.

Smooth scroll in both Firefox and Opera is much smoother in metacity. In compiz its jerky. Flash is not OpenGL hardware accellerated in Compiz while it is in metacity. ANd Google Earth is pretty much always smooth in metacity, while in Compiz its quite spluttery.

Is flash really OpenGL accelerated under metacity? If it is, it will still be accelerated under Compiz. There is a (fairly small) unavoidable overhead involved in compositing, and Compiz effects can be pretty much arbitrarily GPU intensive, but on my nvidia card (7600go), I've never found Compiz (while not performing effects) to make a noticable performance hit in the 3D apps, mainly games, that I've run.

Compiz isn't playing badly with any apps. There are/were some apps that relied on implementation details of Metacity which Compiz doesn't have, but there aren't many of them (now that Java is fixed), and they were always broken.

Originally Posted by | MM |

SO yes, compiz does need to play nicer/better with some apps in some cases. But i fear that even with Xserver changes like DRi2, we will still be waiting on gfx card vendors (nvidia in my case) to update their binary drivers.

As a sweeping over-generalisation, nVidia doesn't care about X infrastructure, they use their own. They don't need DRI2 (they already do redirected direct rendering), they aren't going to support xrandr12 (it doesn't support dual-card as well as TwinView, although I prefer the way xrandr handles one-card-two-screens), and they don't use Mesa at all, so they aren't affected by gallium.

**plun** · June 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by RAOF

Is flash really OpenGL accelerated under metacity? If it is, it will still be accelerated under Compiz. There is a (fairly small) unavoidable overhead involved in compositing, and Compiz effects can be pretty much arbitrarily GPU intensive, but on my nvidia card (7600go), I've never found Compiz (while not performing effects) to make a noticable performance hit in the 3D apps, mainly games, that I've run.

Well Adobes Flash is accelerated...

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2...s_the_gpu.html

Also, for fullscreen OpenGL acceleration, the Flash Player requires that the client glx vendor string be something besides "SGI". Official drivers from, e.g., ATI and Nvidia hopefully do not have "SGI" in this field (check the 'glxinfo' command, for this string and for the extensions listed above). We have this logic in place to detect whether software rendering is in place and fall back on our own software fullscreen in that case. There are more robust ways to detect software rendering but we have seen crash problems on a number of distributions, possibly with outdated libraries.

Another important note: Compiz and GPU-accelerated Flash on Linux do not mix. The Flash Player still works if you have Compiz as your window manager; you just won't be able to make use of GPU-accelerated features. This is a shame since Compiz is coming with the basic installation of various Linux distributions. Unfortunately, things get unstable when trying to do GPU acceleration in SWFs running under Compiz.

Adobes Flash 10 and latest nVidia drivers plays full HD Flash content.

But... I must switch to Metacity and that isn't a problem if you
have a switcher in the systray, fusion-icon is enough.

Nema Problema....

**| MM |** · June 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by plun

Well Adobes Flash is accelerated...

But... I must switch to Metacity and that isn't a problem if you
have a switcher in the systray, fusion-icon is enough.

Nema Problema....

Yea i pretty much do the same...

compiz is nice, i dont hate on it. Its the simple things i like about compiz, the way windows just glide when you move them, and dropshadows, and fade in/out. But when it comes to using my PC without fuss metacity is still the best wm i think.