Hi All, Prior to building my new machine I've been a KDE 3.x user, and it's been a solid base for graphics work, the X11 window manager that comes with it works robustly and does what it's told and generally keeps out of the way - for a full screen visual simulation is just what you want.
With building this new machine I've opted to try KDE 4.1 and experiment with the effect of the new fancy desktop effects. KDE 4.1 is still a bit buggy and lacking in a minor features, but not problematic enough for me to run back to KDE 3.x, and the more I use it the more I like it, both from a aesthetic as well as productivity standpoint. I'm not normal user though... I'm a 3D performance addict, it's my life... fancy desktop effects mean nothing to me if I don't get my solid 60Hz hertz on my biggest databases. My interest in trying out the new desktop effects isn't just a personal thing, all the latest major platforms are now employing desktop compositors, if I don't start exposing myself directly to this world then I won't be able to grok all the problems that end users have. So in I dive... but I'm not alone so I'd like feedback from others on how things are working out for you. My own observations so far is that there is significant performance hit - on a town model that I test against the peformance of my standard test path goes down from 360Hz to 256Hz with vysnc disabled. osgviewer cow.osg performance goes from 2222Hz to 888Hz. This would suggest the extra frame time hit is between 1.1ms and 0.7ms which is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but might be enough for you to miss frame. How are others fairing in the performance stakes with enable/disabling the desktop effects/compositors? The behavioural differences I've seen with moving to KDE 4.1 is that when I run osgviewer and toggle between fullscreen to windowed mode I don't see any window decoration on the window. This artefact occurs whether I enable desktop effects or not. This points to a basic difference in the way that the window manager is handling osgViewer's X11 calls/settings. We've seen others reporting problems under Gnome as well, so it's not just KDE 4.x that we've not performing perfectly on. I'm not an X11 expert, let alone up to speed on the specific requirements of the new window managers, so I need others more knowledgeable on the new X11 mechanisms we should be leverage to get things working sweetly both on older window managers as well as the new cutting edge ones. I've also read on osg-users suggestions about specific full screen modes, rather than the current windowless fullscreen that we currently leverage, so this is another facet that we could explore. For OSG-2.8 it'd be good to solve this windowing behaviour issues, but if we can scoop out some other features at the same time with much extra coding I'm open to suggestions. So please, feedback, how is your platform performing and behaving? Also do you know of any good online resouces that discuss details on how best to manage windowing in the presence of these new window managers? Thanks in advance for your feedback, Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
