On Fri, 25 May 2012, Ryan Gauger wrote:
It doesn't hurt to try. Transparency in Windows 7 usually makes the computer
run slower, but makes too little of a difference to be noticeable. My guess
would be that this same thing happens in Unity. Even though it may be
unnoticeable if this is the case, it still matters, because there are people
who run tests of speed and performance and put those online and make blog posts
about them. I am thinking if anybody or blog would do that, it would probably
be OMG! Ubuntu! Thanks!!!
I feel like we're straying off topic (this is the design list, not the
development list). However, I want to clarify this before people become
misinformed.
Transparency does have a cost, however disabling it wouldn't be of much
effect. Disabling it does allow you to do things like out of order
rendering, however the kind of rendering work that unity does when it
isn't doing things like lighting or gaussian blurs is so cheap that you
wouldn't see a difference.
Transparency in windows comes at a cost because of the fact that you're
doing surface blurs (eg, synchronous operation using the DX equavilent for
glCopyTexSubImage2D or binding of framebuffer objects mid-render-pipe as
well as fragment shaders doing about 9 texture samples per pixel).
Especially on low end hardware where you don't have a lot of shader cores
and can't parallelize this stuff very easily (eg, intel) this comes at a
cost.
If you want real performance gains, the best way to do it is to profile
using tools like callgrind or gprof or the like. For example, a couple of
months ago in compiz we found that we were creating about 200,000 regions
for paint calculation - first we optimzied by reducing the expensive part
of this (memory allocation) and secondly we optimized by reducing the
number of regions that needed to be created in order to do paint area
calculation.
If you wish to contribute in this area, there are plenty of guides as to
how to use callgrind to get useful analytics - contributions would be much
appreciated because the developers don't have access to all the hardware
and every possible configuration that there might be. In addition, running
under callgrind is time-consuming because it slows down operation about
20x while it looks for hot-spots in the code.
Cheers,
Sam
On May 25, 2012, at 3:43 AM, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen
<mikkel.kamst...@canonical.com> wrote:
On 05/24/2012 03:28 PM, Ryan Gauger wrote:
Hi Team,
I just had an idea that may speed up Unity even further. We could
perhaps make transparency behind the launcher an option, so that if
users choose to disable it, their computer's performance and speed
should run a bit smoother. Just an idea :) Thanks!
Sorry, do you have any data to back up the argument that anything would be
measurably faster with launcher transparency disabled? Without any hint of
evidence I don't think this is worth spending time on.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to make everything perform better, but we need a
way to gauge this rigorously, otherwise we're shooting in the dark.
Cheers,
Mikkel
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