GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 725548
gnome-shell animations have low fps
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:35:17 UTC
I thought only Mac OSX could do nice animations ; After seeing the zoom in and out animations of photos in this gnome-shell extension, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/512/wikipedia-search-provider/ I'm astonished to see that smooth animation is possible in gnome-shell!!! Other animations like window tiling animation (actually the shadow does the animation, but the window jerks and snaps), or the appearance of 'scroll dots' on the right-side in applications are amazingly smooth and as expected. yet the overview animation is terrible, even on nouveau and nvidia binary on nvidia 650ti gpu on 1440x900; what to expect on hi-dpi monitors? Overview is smooth on 800x600 resolution! and nobody is using that anymore! Please see this youtube video (1 minute) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4J-IFIsfKc Please, please see this extension, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/512/wikipedia-search-provider/ We need smoother animations than mac osx, at least when it is possilbe :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJKyGMjLlvQ Thanks.
nah, my bad, even on 800x600, it's bad! I think the dynamic workspaces animation + overview window animations + dash sliding out + bottom tray 'message' is causing this stuttering/jerky or low fps animation.
Please see the FPS demo for gnome-shell animations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jy0KY_3eSE&feature=youtu.be screencasting is not a good way to show real life fps, as recording eats up cpu and fps. thanks to Kamil Páral for showing how to use fps info onscreen from: http://kparal.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/fraps-like-fps-overlay-for-linux/ Please try yourself: 1. open gnome-terminal and run GALLIUM_HUD="fps:100" gnome-shell -r observe the fps while different animations, overview is really bad, under 30 fps; The wikipedia search provider extension's photos use 60 fps, which makes them the most smoothest animation. Please try to make the gnome-shell animations to 60 fps. I did use: [rizvan@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/environment CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling CLUTTER_VBLANK=True which didn't really help. FWIW, steam games like bit.trip runner 2 runs at 120+ fps; and dolphin-emu games run also at 100+ fps.
I got the same result as you. Gnome-shell animations don't seems fluid like others applications with 3D effects or games as well. Using radeon driver r600 on HD 6670. On my old laptop with radeon hd 3200 the efects are horrible, so i had to disable it with "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false"
I can confirm a problem here. Jerky overview animation, using Radeon driver on Fedora 20 with HD4850 and HD6950. On my laptop with Intel HD graphics things are not really better.
kde4 kwin's TOP-LEFT Corner overview has good fps 60 all the time on the same machine with free drivers, i.e., Nouveau. That just feel so smooth and fluid. Please try with kwin GALLIUM_HUD="fps:100" kwin --replace But I love Gnome 3 for its simplicity and beauty. Other than overview, other desktop effects in kde are jerky (inconsistent (though 100+) fps usage) I think the sudden fps increase/decrease in fps cause this issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate#Video_games thanks.
Here's KDE4's kwin present window desktop effect (i.e., gnome's window overview) which is around 60fps all the time! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPF2gropA2Y&feature=youtu.be The little stutter we see is due to screen capture software, else it is very fluid and smooth visual experience to see the windows zoom in and out. To test, yum install kde-workspace xterm init 3; #login as user / root xinit #in the xterm type: plasma-desktop; GALLIUM_HUD="fps:100" kwin --replace press ctrl+f9 or ctrl+f10 after opening a few apps. thanks.
Are there any gnome devs who work on performance tuning? It seems there are none! Look at gnome2 (mate) + compiz with free drivers, the effects are so smooth and fluid that I can't believe that it is better than Mac OSX or Windows; KDE and gnome3 just can't compete with compiz's performance... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvpoZl_3Z-U How to test: get mate spin from: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/ run GALLIUM_HUD="fps:100" compiz-mate-gtk --replace You'll be pleasantly surprise how fluid the desktop effects are! No other desktop I have used can do such smooth animations. But gnome-shell (gnome3) has the best user interface compared to gnome2; Please try to get the compiz fluidity in gnome3. I am complaining about animation performance, and it only shows that I love gnome3 and want it to be popular.
No, there are no full-time engineers working on performance tuning. We know that there are performance issues, but GNOME's codebase is extremely different from Compiz and Unity, and of course even more different from OS X and Windows. Investigating and profiling about why the animations are slow would be the most help. You can try to get a rough idea about what's taking up performance with a tool like callgrind, sysprof or perf. apitrace is also good for GPU-level profiling.
Can you inform us how to test gnome-shell with those tools generating useful data for developers?
Jasper, I'm not sure what you mean by your last comment. Is that a request to the reporter to gather these profiles and post them here? If so some guidance on producing some actionable data would be useful for us, perhaps in the form of a wiki entry to be most helpful. -- I'm not sure if this should be in its own bug, but I don't think I've ever experienced the "Show Applications" animation running smoothly, even on fglrx. On 800x600 it still struggles to reach 60fps and stutters at various points in the animation. Perhaps this needs to be refactored to improve this situation...
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.