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Bug 727268 - Serious animation stutter and lag in Gnome Shell
Serious animation stutter and lag in Gnome Shell
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: gnome-shell
Classification: Core
Component: overview
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal critical
: ---
Assigned To: gnome-shell-maint
gnome-shell-maint
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2014-03-28 20:34 UTC by equites.vero
Modified: 2021-07-05 14:29 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Output of lshw command. (18.07 KB, application/octet-stream)
2014-03-28 20:34 UTC, equites.vero
Details

Description equites.vero 2014-03-28 20:34:48 UTC
Created attachment 273196 [details]
Output of lshw command.

Up till Gnome 3.4.1 on Ubuntu 12.04, everything in Gnome Shell ran with superb speed and extremely fast and beautifully on my system. All subsequent versions, 3.6 - 3.12 for some unknown reason, have stuttering and lag, in 3.12 stuttering at the zoom-in entrance animation to lag when window is selected from the overview, and severe lag  when a background wallpaper is selected, even the dialog box closing animation lags. This happens in all distros, including Ubuntu, Sabayon, ROSA, etc.. This makes Gnome Shell hard on the eyes, and unusable without severe distraction.  I do not know why Gnome 3.4.1 still runs beautifully if I install an older Ubuntu release (I can't use it though, as it has a problem of random hangups on login), yet all new Gnome versions have cropped up this problem and I wish Gnome devs would fix this at once. I'm only a newbie, but all I know is I haven't been able to use Gnome for so much time.

Attaching hardware info.
Comment 1 v.holthaus 2014-10-31 08:48:01 UTC
I have the same problem and i hope that this would be corrected in the future
Comment 2 Owen Taylor 2014-10-31 15:28:14 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> I have the same problem and i hope that this would be corrected in the future

A) What distribution B) what version of GNOME C) what video card and driver? This is not a common problem, so we need to find commonalities to find out what is going on.
Comment 3 v.holthaus 2014-10-31 15:39:21 UTC
A) Arch Kernel 3.17.2-1-ARCH
B) gnome-shell 3.14.1
C1) NVidia Geforce GTX 880M 8GB
C2) nvidia 343.22-4 / mesa-dri 10.3.2-1 / xf86-video-intel 2.99.916-3

Just ask, if you need more information.

Regards

Volker
Comment 4 Juraj Fiala 2015-05-02 16:31:29 UTC
I experience horrible lag too, which is strange, because although I have a one-core, the log-in woosh effect is handled at 60 FPS, and so are many other things. I have also tried Plasma, and I experience zero lag there, but it probably isn't related.

A) Arch Linux 4.0.1-2
B) gnome-shell 3.16.1-2
C1) ATI Mobility Radeon 3200
C2) xf86-video-ati 1:7.5.0-2 mesa 10.5.4-1

Thanks.
Comment 5 gnome38 2015-07-22 10:16:38 UTC
I experience it too using gnome-shell 3.16.3 and all other GTK3 packages are the latest stable. I am experiencing the "sluggishness" using both Ubuntu and Arch (both x64). The wierd thing though is that under FREQUENT apps it is A LOT SMOOTHER than under "ALL". How can this be?

Also try to run your mouse over the program icons under both FREQUENT and ALL and see the difference between them two.

I know GNOME is free software and I am so appreciative for that BUT this needs to be fixed ASAP. It is a real distraction to an otherwise quite smooth experience.

Regards.
Comment 6 gnome38 2015-07-22 10:19:17 UTC
I want to add that it is also happening when animations are disabled in Tweak Tool.
Comment 7 Daniel 2017-02-22 14:44:36 UTC
I'm experiencing this bug as well. I'm on Ubuntu 16.10 and GNOME 3.22. All animations are "jerky"/"janky"/feel like they have a very slow framerate. This is compared to Unity 7 with compiz which runs smooth as butter.

In particular the desktop overview animation, application overview animation, window dragging, and window resizing all are very noticeably choppy.

I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, 3rd generation with a Skylake processor and Intel HD 520 graphics. I believe I'm running with kernel modesetting.

Given that I have the same X11 driver in use both under Unity and GNOME, I assume it's the GNOME compositor that's causing issues.
Comment 8 gnome38 2017-03-16 13:17:25 UTC
It has become somewhat better in recent GNOME versions but far from a smooth experience. I wish there was a way to donate money for just optimizing purposes.
Comment 9 Juraj Fiala 2017-03-16 13:44:59 UTC
I think on my machine the icon operations in the shell do the most damage in terms of FPS. Would a sysprof of some icon-heavy tasks help?
Comment 10 gnome38 2017-03-29 11:15:55 UTC
The lag/stuttering in GNOME 3.24 is better on my two computers but not "good" yet.

Is it possible to donate money only to the cause of optimizing GNOME? THAT I would donate to right away! After all I do appreciate you making this open source software even though I think somewhere down the line optimized code/performance should be of a greater importance than constantly adding features when the foundation is not rock solid/fast.
Comment 11 groucho 2017-04-06 14:01:28 UTC
I have tried kwin and compiz and they are quite smooth on my machine.
I really like gnome, but switching back to it ends up in a more and more frustrating experience.

On my Intel GPU, animations used to be smoother with uxa a few years ago, until triple buffering was dropped in the Intel driver. Now, uxa sna dri2 dri3 modesetting and wayland have similar results (not smooth).

I have also tried to disable the animations, but there is still a delay and it doesn't feel as snappy as it should.
Comment 12 jari_45 2017-05-09 19:28:01 UTC
I can confirm that Gnome is really slow compared to other distros, like others said, it would be very good if gnome was tested and optimezed also on/for slower PCs. I use Intel haswell with intel graphic and I think this config shoud be good enough to handle Gnome DE.
Comment 13 tenten8401 2017-05-31 14:17:00 UTC
(In reply to jari_45 from comment #12)
> I can confirm that Gnome is really slow compared to other distros, like
> others said, it would be very good if gnome was tested and optimezed also
> on/for slower PCs. I use Intel haswell with intel graphic and I think this
> config shoud be good enough to handle Gnome DE.

Even on my fast PC, having an RX 480, 16 GB ram, and an i5 6500, I still notice quite a bit of stuttering in Gnome 3.24 on Wayland and X. In Wayland, the cursor stutters noticeably too. Using Plasma 5 right now and it's buttery smooth.
Comment 14 Strangiato 2017-08-15 14:16:32 UTC
Same happens on my two computers, both running Antergos (Arch-based), with modesetting driver and mesa 17.1.6:

Celeron G1820, 8 GiB of ram, Intel hd graphics
i3 3110M, 8 GiB of ram, intel hd 4000
Comment 15 Ray Strode [halfline] 2017-08-15 20:37:21 UTC
those with recent intel laptops might be hitting 

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102199

especially if the problem goes away when plugging in an external monitor.
Comment 16 Eugene 2018-05-20 18:47:55 UTC
Clean install of ubuntu 18.04.

Animations of show apps (win + a) is ok, maximize and minimize windows too, but the animation of showing all the open windows (the "win" key or click Activities on top left corner) looks very bad, like 10 fps.

I have Intel® Core™ i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz × 4 and Nvidia GeForce GT 1030/PCIe/SSE2.
Comment 17 purfett 2018-06-23 18:45:09 UTC
Still great lag and stuttering on some low powered machine (that work well with other wms):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xSgzaoHO9Q
Comment 18 Daniel van Vugt 2018-06-27 08:39:50 UTC
Ubuntu users in particular, we are tracking the performance problems here:

  https://trello.com/c/Q6JYXPPs
  https://trello.com/c/pe5mRmx7

If you find something that's not on those lists then please report a bug with 'ubuntu-bug gnome-shell'.
Comment 19 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2021-07-05 14:29:51 UTC
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.