This is something I don't get, and I don't think it occurred before the last few years I've beem using Linux. I installed Linux on a worn out laptop (ie. hard disk is fragile, USB, Firewire and sound card fried, and Windows refuses to boot), but it still runs pretty smoothly. After all, the point of installing Linux was to extend its life as much as possible. I don't think it's that.

However, I notice when I make animations or movies (without the sound) full screen the FPS slows down tenfold. Is this supposed to happen? Glxgears gets around 250 FPS on normal screen, but maximised it becomes 21.


I have a i810 integrated chipset, I think. I know it's an integrated chipset and I forgot what it explicitly was, but it's probably an i810 (can't seem to find appropriate info in /proc). There is the issue that I also can't seem to get the kernel to use the framebuffer at boot, since it gives me a blank screen. Not sure if this is related to drivers, but I'll create another thread. It could be the same underlying problem, I suppose.

Dozens of other issues, but I suppose I'll reserve that for other threads.

Yes, that's normal.

For example, if I play full screen video in Windows for example, this doesn't happen. This highly perplexes me because Windows has no performance loss for full screen.

Complexity of graphics (ie. computer games like America's Army) I naturally expect slowdowns of course, but not this.

There is a difference between fullscreen and maximized. Fullscreen changes the screen resolution to that of the small window (640x480, for example), retaining the same performance. Maximizing a window (like glxgears) increases the size of the image to the resolution of the screen (for example, 1280x1024).

The issue is that when I play the videos fullscreen they keep their resolution....but it perplexes me because even though the full screen image has less pixels per inch it runs even slower...