LinuxQuestions.org - Amazing drop of glxgears under gnome!

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Amazing drop of glxgears under gnome!

I have an ati radeon 9600 pro with the latest drivers (3.11.1) working with 3d acceleration.Under kde i get about 4700 fps in glxgears but under gnome i get about 1750 fps!!!!Why?????

PS fglrxinfo under gnome (as under kde) returns:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 Generic
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-3.11.1)

What on earth is going on????

this is an interesting question
theoretically this shouldn't be happening and you should get the same results generally
so the only thing i can thing of is possibly there is something in GNOME that is misconfigured to the point of eating up cpu cycles with some race condition or something.
is there anything strange about the processes running while under GNOME ???
or indication in logs about something going haywire ??

Where should i look?

first just look in gSystemMonitor
CPU should be like 98% idle
if it's not which process it using it up??
and go from there
then i think look in x and service and kernel log files
this stuff can be different places and called different things
mine are in /var/log
it's hard to know ahead of time what to look for
you can post log files somewhere and have us look if you like
i'd look for stuff like
(this was from my service log once when i had a race condition and it repeated over and over for pages and pages on end until i fixed it when i started kde)

Code:

04/4/14@08:43:41: FAIL: sgi_fam address from=<no address>

04/4/14@08:43:41: START: sgi_fam pid=348 from=<no address>

04/4/14@08:43:41: FAIL: sgi_fam address from=<no address>

04/4/14@08:43:41: START: sgi_fam pid=349 from=<no address

i get this one in my kernel log when i startx but it only repeats a few times then stops

Code:

Apr 13 09:04:34 sourcery kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x7a on isa0060/serio0).

Apr 13 09:04:34 sourcery kernel: atkbd.c: This is an XFree86 bug. It shouldn't access hardware directly.

Apr 13 09:04:34 sourcery kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x7a on isa0060/serio0).

Apr 13 09:04:34 sourcery kernel: atkbd.c: This is an XFree86 bug. It shouldn't access hardware directly.

basically repeating errors
some logs will just file something like above error repeated 87 times or something.
i think i'd also look at ram used in gnome like -- try changing the background image over and over
while checking x memory usage in gSystemMonitor and make sure it's not going up and up and up.

Doubt this is your problem, but are you positive that you are running both KDE and GNOME at the same screen resolution? If you make the gears program window larger, then your FPS will go down.

Here r my files under /var/log :

[george@localhost log]$ ls
acpid dmesg messages.2 secure.1 up2date.2
boot.log gdm messages.3 secure.2 up2date.3
boot.log.1 lastlog ppp secure.3 vbox
boot.log.2 mail prelink.log spooler wtmp
boot.log.3 maillog rpmpkgs spooler.1 wtmp.1
cron maillog.1 rpmpkgs.1 spooler.2 Xorg.0.log
cron.1 maillog.2 rpmpkgs.2 spooler.3 Xorg.0.log.old
cron.2 maillog.3 rpmpkgs.3 system-config-network
cron.3 messages scrollkeeper.log up2date
cups messages.1 secure up2date.1
[george@localhost log]$

I've searched a couple myself but couldn't find something weird! Do u want me to post any file?

PS 1 There is no application eating up my CPU resources-i've checked that
PS 2 Yes it is the same analysis and the same window size

I can't believe it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I ran glxgears again , still the same low fps compared tokde and then i had the idea to move (not resize) the glxgear window a bit. Then i noticed that the fps raised to the kde levels ( around 4700)!!AMAZING!

that's wild --

I wonder if it's a bug in X or the radeon drivers or the opengl libs ???
possibly a bug report is in order but i don't understand opengl enough to know

I wouldn't worry about it too much. glxgears is not a well designed test suite. It is just meant to give you an idea of performance. i.e. bogoMIPS. It probably just started in a spot that required some heavy refreshing of the screen. Just for kicks ... start up a window manager that uses very few resources, such as TWM or FVWM2 and see how it does there. I bet your numbers are higher.

doesn't seem lke the window manager has anything to do with glxgears ??
just a frame around the thing....
gnome wm or kde wm just as light as fvwm and twm really or very close....
the thing missing from fvwm or twm is desktop environment
but unless you are really low on ram that shouldn't effect anything either i don't think ??
an interesting test might be to start kde with another wm like fvwm
then minimize the kde desktop and kill of fvwm
then from kde menu run a term then glxgears wiithout a window manager at all
i bet the numbers are exactly the same