beryl performance - is this normal?

Message

albright · Post by **albright** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:27 pm

I have fujitsu p7010 notebook running beryl+aiglx. this is a 1.1 ghz
centrino with intel 855GM video. Beryl runs pretty good and looks
great ... but

If I open three konsole windows and let it just sit there is a steady
30% cpu usage (of course, if I move a window it goes to 80% or
more).

I wonder: is this the kind of performance penalty I should expect
on this kind of hardware? Or is there a way to improve things?

(I've done the vsync thing and increased framerate ...)

Cybersorcerer · Post by **Cybersorcerer** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 6:34 pm

Hi,

i have tried it on my Dell M90 and have seen up to 25 % Usage by beryl and an additional 12 to 15 % cpu usage by X.
I decided that this eyecandy stuff is not worth this kind of overhead

Janax · Post by **Janax** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 7:35 pm

One thing you may want to be aware of. Apparently if you have sub-pixel hinting on, ALL KDE apps (including Konsole) will really render slowly. Once I turned mine off and went with standard font anti-aliasing that really helped a lot!

You can find the anti-aliasing settings in Control Center under 'Appearance & Themes/Fonts'.

Cybersorcerer · Post by **Cybersorcerer** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 6:44 am

I don't use sub-pixel hinting andl my system was not slow BUT 30% and more overhead, just for some eyecandy, is far too much. At the end of the day i have work to do with my laptop

. I dropped it and i won't bring it back until these problems are solved.

HecHacker1 · Post by **HecHacker1** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:50 pm

Cybersorcerer wrote:I don't use sub-pixel hinting andl my system was not slow BUT 30% and more overhead, just for some eyecandy, is far too much. At the end of the day i have work to do with my laptop . I dropped it and i won't bring it back until these problems are solved.

i have a 700m with 1.7GHz and 855gm. Beryl-Aiglx-Xorg7.1 works great here, with almost no idle usage. However, I did have to lower my color depth to 16bit (a limitation of the 855gm chipset) in order to get fast frame rates (easily does 75fps in vsync in 16bit mode). I can also use 32bit color, but beryl slows down a lot, and animations become choppy; although idle cpu usage doesn't go up.

albright · Post by **albright** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 10:01 pm

Thanks for the sub-pixel and color depth tips - made a real
difference here ...

procelain · Post by **procelain** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 5:36 am

I have beryl "running" on a samsungQ35 (1.6 GHz core duo, Intel 945GM). The idle CPU usage is 3% and I guess it is only so high since top's window is updated in the moment of measurement. Even the fancy window effects don't use much CPU. But as soon as I have to windows lying one upon the other, my CPU is COMPLETELY consumed. Even 16bit depth would not work...

HecHacker1 · Post by **HecHacker1** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 7:37 am

procelain wrote:I have beryl "running" on a samsungQ35 (1.6 GHz core duo, Intel 945GM). The idle CPU usage is 3% and I guess it is only so high since top's window is updated in the moment of measurement. Even the fancy window effects don't use much CPU. But as soon as I have to windows lying one upon the other, my CPU is COMPLETELY consumed. Even 16bit depth would not work...

maybe i'm the odd one out, but right now I have firefox fullscreen in the background, a nautilus window above, semi transparent, and a transparent gnome terminal on top. CPU usage? a few percent. The benchmark plugin shows I have 50fps at idle and 40fps while moving a window on top of all that other stuff.

If I have a single app open, the fps goes to 75-100, although my screen is locked at 75fps for preventing tearing.

Maybe you guys are running unnecessary plugins? The blurfx-reflection and water plugins don't work properly on <915 chipsets (no shader support). Also, I have the texture filter set to "good" because "best" doesn't look any better. I have my refresh rate match my screen to get smoother visuals.

Also, In my Xorg.conf I have VideoRam=119000. My upper limit is 128MB and some space needs to be preserved for X to allocate pixmaps (search for the i810 and xgl thread).

przemos · Post by **przemos** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:19 am

HecHacker1 wrote: Also, In my Xorg.conf I have VideoRam=119000. My upper limit is 128MB and some space needs to be preserved for X to allocate pixmaps (search for the i810 and xgl thread).

Can you paste here interesting sections from your Xorg.conf? And tell us which plugis did you enable. Thx in advance.

justbrowsing · Post by **justbrowsing** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 9:39 am

Hi all,

procelain wrote:I have beryl "running" on a samsungQ35 (1.6 GHz core duo, Intel 945GM).

this is a quite fast machine compared to mine and should be capable to work fine with beryl. Supposing you're all running aiglx, I would suggest to check the use-flags of your xorg-server. In the latest versions the aiglx-patches are disabled by default because they seriously hurt the performance using exa.

Code: Select all

fsc1 bin # equery u xorg-server|grep aiglx
+aiglx

If you get "-aiglx", add the use-flag aiglx and rebuild xorg-server.

Hth

November Rain · Post by **November Rain** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 5:22 pm

I have the same Problem like procelain, if i have only one windows open then the cpu usage is about 3 % but if i have more windows open it raise up to 100 %(both cores). I'll try to rebuild Xorg with the aigxl flag but I dont think this can help me because i'm using the nvidia driver extensions to run beryl.

LoSeR_5150 · Post by **LoSeR_5150** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 8:02 am

I get much better performance using aiglx than using just the nvidia drivers extensions to run beryl... might be worth a try to use aiglx and see if your performance increases / cpu utilization goes down

sonicbhoc · Post by **sonicbhoc** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:09 pm

On my piece of crap 1 GHz Compaq Deskpro EN with an ati radeon 7200 (64MB video ram), I built the system with a new kernel (from rt-sources to emissions-sources) and that thing went from slow to fast pretty quick.

November Rain · Post by **November Rain** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 10:29 pm

LoSeR_5150 wrote:I get much better performance using aiglx than using just the nvidia drivers extensions to run beryl... might be worth a try to use aiglx and see if your performance increases / cpu utilization goes down

I tried do setup an aiglx server, how do i know that beryl is using the aixgl server and not the driver extentions? the performance seems to be the same(at least one cpu is used only by x and beryl)

LoSeR_5150 · Post by **LoSeR_5150** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 6:18 am

As of nvidia drivers 9631 using beryl --force-nvidia is faster than --force-aiglx so I have stopped using aiglx also i have notice a HUGE drop in my cpu usage now that use just the nvidia drivers. It was around 20% max with aiglx (i.e. desktop cube with ungrab water effects ) now it is 4% max. fps is around 7200