I'm sorry, I didn't know there was a development list. That's why I am off-topic. :)
On May 25, 2012, at 9:29 AM, sam.spilsb...@canonical.com wrote: > 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 >>> >>> -- >>> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-design >>> Post to : unity-design@lists.launchpad.net >>> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-design >>> More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp >> >> -- >> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-design >> Post to : unity-design@lists.launchpad.net >> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-design >> More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp >> -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-design Post to : unity-design@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-design More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
