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Bug 466939 - The new GNOMEtris is slow and laggy
The new GNOMEtris is slow and laggy
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: gnome-games-superseded
Classification: Deprecated
Component: quadrapassel
2.19.x
Other Linux
: Normal critical
: ---
Assigned To: GNOME Games maintainers
GNOME Games maintainers
: 483287 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2007-08-15 13:16 UTC by Alexander “weej” Jones
Modified: 2012-01-31 23:25 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Screenshot (58.62 KB, image/png)
2007-08-15 13:20 UTC, Alexander “weej” Jones
Details

Description Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-15 13:16:48 UTC
Adding the first few blocks is fine, but after about 10 blocks are added the game becomes unplayable. I assume this is because of the complexity in the new drawing code. The controls start to lag behind a lot and you can sit back and watch it process keyboard commands you gave it 10 seconds ago.
Comment 1 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-15 13:20:50 UTC
Created attachment 93716 [details]
Screenshot

As you can see, my ability to play GNOMEtris is severely impaired.
Comment 2 Andreas Røsdal 2007-08-15 21:34:41 UTC
Thanks for the feedback, Alex.   

What kind of system do you have?

You always have the option of selecting some of the old themes. You find them in the preference dialog. 

The new default theme will be more demanding of your system than the previous themes. I still think the new theme is a vast improvement, and will not let very old systems get in the way of progress.  :-)

Comment 3 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-15 21:42:29 UTC
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood with 1 GB of RAM.

This thing can push UT2004 around at nigh on 100fps at 1280x1024.
Comment 4 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-15 21:55:09 UTC
Even with the old theme it takes ten seconds for a window to open.

The UI draws fine, but if I dirty it, it's apparent that it takes another 5 seconds to draw.

It takes 3 seconds for the little tiny preview widget to update (and unblock the rest of the UI) when changing themes.

I'm not kidding when I say that UT2004 is faster!
Comment 5 Andreas Røsdal 2007-08-15 21:58:07 UTC
> 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood with 1 GB of RAM.

However, have you configured your X server properly for 2d accelereation? 
Installed proper drivers etc?    For example, a framebuffer driver for X will usually have terrible 2D performance.
Comment 6 Scott Percival 2007-08-16 00:42:37 UTC
It would appear the major performance drop and hugely-huge wait is caused by the gnometris.svg background in /usr/share/pixmaps/gnometris; renaming it causes the wait to disappear. More specifically, it's the 1% gaussian blur applied to the border of the SVG; removing it also seems to fix things.
Comment 7 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-16 01:53:18 UTC
Any ideas about the lock up after it first loads? And then again during the theme selection?
Comment 8 Scott Percival 2007-08-16 02:02:01 UTC
(In reply to comment #7)

The lock up after it first loads should be caused by /usr/share/pixmaps/gnometris/gnometris.svg . Try renaming it.

Comment 9 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-08-16 03:25:58 UTC
OK that fixes, startup, the initial lockup once it opens AND the theme previewing.

Unfortunately, the Tango Shaded theme still slows down once a few blocks are on the board. I wonder if there's any blurring in that...
Comment 10 Scott Percival 2007-08-16 06:39:24 UTC
Sadly, you may be right. While Tango Shaded looks really nice, the strain of rendering two gradients per miniature tetris cubelet is evidently too much for the X11 Cairo driver. Hopefuly Tango Flat (which only uses solid fill) shouldn't be as bad. 

I might be doing it all wrong however; if there are any Cairo wizards reading this please feel free to have a stab at optimizing it.
Comment 11 Scott Ritchie 2007-09-25 21:12:51 UTC
Why is this NOTABUG?  The game as it is is unplayable.
Comment 12 Alexander “weej” Jones 2007-09-25 21:24:50 UTC
Are we gonna port this to OpenGL then? We can add nice exposion effects and stuff like Tetris DS then, without killing XRender.
Comment 13 Thomas Andersen 2007-09-25 22:21:09 UTC
This still an issue? I thought it had gone away. Damn.

I just tested it myself. Even Tango Flat seems to get slow for me after a few blocks. This is not a state of the art machine but tetris should run very well on this hardware.

Unless we find a solution for this before 2.20.1 I think we should remove the background and have Plain as default
Comment 14 Andreas Røsdal 2007-09-26 14:42:22 UTC
Could those who are complaining about the rendering speed please report what kind of drivers, CPU and graphics card they are using?

The current rendering speed is pretty good on any decent system with updated X graphics drivers. This is really the biggest problem: people are using the default X setup, with often doesn't accelerate 2D graphics rendering. For example, gutsy is in most cases configured with a framebuffer X driver, which has awful performance. It will be impossible to create good looking games for GNOME if people are stuck with old and slow framebuffer drivers.

I would recommend to create a new background and keep the new tango shaded theme.
The old plain black background with the old plain theme made Gnometris look awful and old. 

So, someone should create a new background, with some nice colors, and less gradients and special effects. That will make a big impact in the rendering performance. 


 
Comment 15 Thomas Andersen 2007-09-26 16:31:47 UTC
AMD 3400+
2,5 GB RAM
Nvidia 6600GT with proprietary drivers. 
Runs compiz just fine.

While I agree that we need prettier games we should also make sure that it is actually playable for most users too. If we keep it we are going to get tons of bug reports for this.
Comment 16 Scott Ritchie 2007-09-26 18:07:18 UTC
Latest Gutsy snapshot, Athlon 64 3000+, Nvidia 6800 GT with proprietary drivers, 64 bit edition.

I'm not using Compiz (I get the missing window decorator bug still).
Comment 17 Andreas Røsdal 2007-10-04 16:33:08 UTC
*** Bug 483287 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 18 Jessicatz Fairymeadow 2007-10-26 21:13:06 UTC
I confirm this bug. Tango Shared theme slows down the game to unplayable.
Plain theme doesn't impair performance on my system and the game is playable.

AMD XP 2200+ 1.8gHz
1.5 GB DDR Ram
NVidia Geforce 6600GT restricted (proprietary) drivers
DirectRendering enabled.

Also, the new playing field is 21x15 in size, which is not standard
Tetris, which is 20x10, and it makes the game infinitely easier.
That is a design choice, but configurable field size would be nice.
I'm adding that to the wish list, should I ever find it :)

Comment 19 Bradlee Landis 2008-01-23 04:03:36 UTC
Ubuntu 7.10
Gnometris 2.20.1
AMD Athlon 64-bit 3000+
1 GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce FX5500 with Propriety Drivers

I played this game with the onboard video, and with the nvidia, and both have the same results... slow and unplayable after a certain period of time. The reaction to the keyboard gets to be slow (i.e. Holding down to get one piece makes 3 pieces show up and automatically fall down).

This is critical as far as I'm concerned.
Comment 20 Andreas Røsdal 2008-02-03 11:33:32 UTC
Yes, something should probably be done with this, since quite a lot of people are reporting similar problems. Here are some alternatives:

- Rollback to old and ugly theme.

- Do performance profiling of the rendering, and find out where the performance bottleneck is.

Comment 21 Alexander “weej” Jones 2008-02-03 11:43:57 UTC
The lag problem is because we are saturating the X server with Xrender ops. Syncing inside the expose function is an easy way to prevent this and allows it to throttle itself naturally.
Comment 22 Andreas Røsdal 2008-02-03 12:21:37 UTC
Great Alex! Since you appear to have found a cause of the lag, it appears that it can be resolved. If you could be so kind as to submit a patch to us, that would be very very much appreciated!
Comment 23 João Matos 2008-02-13 03:52:22 UTC
I can confirm this one.

It's really slow and laggy here too. :)

Hope this one gets nailed out soon.
Comment 24 Andreas Røsdal 2008-02-20 17:34:32 UTC
Jordi Mas has committed an improvement to the rendering to SVN.
This means that the performance problems could be solved now.
Here are the changes:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-games?view=revision&revision=7396


Could everyone with performance problems please try the lastest SVN version?
Comment 25 Andreas Røsdal 2008-02-20 17:36:05 UTC
Note that this means that a rollback to the old-and-ugly theme can be delayed for now.
Comment 26 Thomas Andersen 2008-02-22 11:42:57 UTC
Unfortunately I'm still having the performance problem with the patch
Comment 27 Jonas Jørgensen 2008-03-25 17:07:15 UTC
The patch hasn't fixed the problem. Multiple users are still having the problem. See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-games/+bug/138586>.

Please reopen this bug.
Comment 28 Andreas Røsdal 2008-03-25 19:59:43 UTC
In reply to comment #27, are you sure that they are using gnome-games 2.22.0 or later?
Comment 29 Jonas Jørgensen 2008-03-25 20:08:37 UTC
One of those commenters was seeing the bug on ubuntu 8.04 alpha 6, and that shipped on march 6th, and included the latest gnome code at the time, if I understand correctly, so since the patch was checked in on february 20th, it should have been included. Unless I am misunderstanding something.
Comment 30 Andreas Røsdal 2008-03-25 21:36:53 UTC
This is not a definitive confirmation that the reporters are using gnome-games 2.22.0 or later. It would be better to wait until there are more confirmed reports  in gnome-games version 2.22.0 or later, before reopening this bug.
Comment 31 Jonas Jørgensen 2008-03-25 22:25:37 UTC
But what about comment 26 here, from a developer, saying he still experiences problems after the patch has been applied?
Comment 32 Sven Arvidsson 2008-04-06 18:40:27 UTC
Here's another downstream bug report about the same problem,
http://bugs.debian.org/447515

It's being reported as still present in 2.22.0:
"I've just experienced this issue with gnometris from gnome-games
version 1:2.22.0-1 on a Debian testing box (i386 architecture).
The "Plain" theme seems to be playable, but "Joined", "Tango flat", and
"Tango shaded" are slow and become unplayable after some 10 pieces
appear on the playing area."
Comment 33 Jason Clinton 2009-02-22 02:45:43 UTC
Fixed on trunk and will be in 2.26 if --enable-clutter is used to build the game. This will be the default for 2.27. It's up to your distro. to turn this on for 2.26. It's recommended.
Comment 34 Robert Ancell 2012-01-31 23:25:30 UTC
This bug is being reassigned to the "quadrapassel" component so we can close the gnometris bugzilla component.  Apologies for the mass email!