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Idea #2876: Compiz and OpenGL problems

bug This idea was marked as being in development the 13 June 08. Target release: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.
Written by johan the 3 Mar 08 at 21:54. Category: Graphics. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: In development
Rationale
This is what I want:

I want to be able to mark applications "Not Compiz compatible" so that Compiz shuts down when I launch a game or some other 3D-heavy application. This is something I want to improve stability and performance for such applications.
Tags: 3d compiz games


Developer comments
This will be automatically fixed with the arrival of DRI2 and updated drivers. There is no point in adding a plugin or workaround like suggested. The caveat here is that the initial support for DRI2 is only for intel's i915 at the moment... maybe with i965 following shortly thereafter.

When the OpenSource drivers for ATI (radeon,radeonHD) and nVIDIA (nouveau) will support DRI2 is still unknown. But the only way to fix the mentioned bugs is via DRI2. There is not much action that can come from our (Canonical) side as we don't have any experienced upstream Xorg developer in our team.

1083
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Selected solution (#1): Auto-generated solution of idea #2876
Written by johan the 3 Mar 08 at 21:54.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #2876 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!
0
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Selected solution (#2): Disable compiz automatically before using 3D apps/games
Written by launchpad99 the 24 Jun 09 at 14:37.
when compiz is enabled , every application/game that uses 3D acceleration slow down so much.
So i should disable compiz, play the 3D game, and the enable again compiz. Honestly, i just disabled compiz all the time.
So... what about, for a better desktop experience, make compiz disable everytime a 3D app is executed, and automatically enable it when it's ended ??

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Comments
UBfusion wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 22:02
I like your idea.

I think I had such a problem with Google Earth - it would flicker badly until I disabled desktop effects.

tomaszx wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 22:24
very good idea

Vote +1

madjr wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 03:21
it could detect automatically when openGL is being requested and ask the user if he wants to disable desktop effects.

also, your idea of manually adding programs is good too :)

christopher_lees wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 04:02
Great idea! I don't have trouble with games or Google Earth while I'm running Compiz, but curiously enough I do have trouble with Noteedit and Kdenlive. So yes, I'd love this feature.

Of course, the best solution is to update all programs so they are compatible regardless...

avixK7 wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 04:33
I've been thinking about such a solution for a while now. Great idea :D Some games that I play don't respond very well unless I manually disable Compiz first.

A feature like this would be great :)

Yanqui wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 06:02
We have this exact propblem with one of our applications at work. We've been wanting to give everyone compiz, but it doesn't work with Pro/E Wildfire (crappy app, stay away from it if you can). This would be nice.
+1

c.sokun wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 07:55
Oh, how about exclude workspace from Compiz so that once you switch into the workspace Compiz shutdown :)

Madsrh wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 08:44
This would be nice. You should check out Compiz Fusion Tray Icon. Perhaps it can provide a solution for now.

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2007/08/26/compiz-fusion-tray-icon/

xapient wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 09:22
why make compiz aware of this applications.. is this the right way? i think its better to ask google for better compiz support in their apps. compiz and wms like it are the future..

tomatz wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 11:43
Excellent idea! +1

Kammy wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 12:07
Several Games may Flicker with Compiz Fusion. A nice solution would be that Compiz-Fusion disable by default if a 3d-Application runs Fullscreen.

dendron wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 14:10
This is a bad idea. Auto-disabling compiz may leave user without a window manager at all.
If you have problems with compiz just report them to compiz developers.

Psycho_zs wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 14:57
Compiz affects heavily on framerate. For example: Urban Terror shows ~90 fps on (NV6600GT nvidia-glx drivers) when using metacity. When using compiz UrT's internal counter continues to show ~90 fps, but actual framerate falls below 30-20.
Sauerbraten's counter shows change correctly: 120/40 (metacity/compiz)

Blender cannot be run in windowed mode with compiz.

So yes. It is very good idea!

Psycho_zs wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 14:58
Oh yes, on ATI and some intel videocards it is TOTALLY impossible to use any 3d apps and watch video when using compiz!!!

terlmann wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 15:58
Plus Plus. Please Implement.

Tush wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 17:41
Definitely! Firefox runs slow as hell for me when Compiz is running.

Lorenz wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 17:41
+1

I think that's a good idea!

Vadim P. wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 18:00
Great idea.

For now, to easily solve this, get Compiz Switch - it's a little button you can have in your gnome panel, that when you click, will toggle compiz on/off.

http://forlong.blogage.de/article/pages/Compiz-Switch

pornographer wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 19:36
Yep. Due to me being forgetful about this issue (so not using a toggle button) I have reimplemented several of my launchers as a small shell script that first runs metacity --replace before launching the app.
Natch I still have to re-launch compiz after, so a better native solution would be great.

days_of_ruin wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 20:32
Great idea.I think it should automatically disable compiz if an app is fullscreen.

jfanaian wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 21:40
A suggestion would be for it to be handled similar to Vista's "advanced effects." Whenever you run a 3d-app on full screen (I think, I'm not completely certain as I don't use Vista too often) it will pop-up a notification telling you that the advanced effects have been disabled because you are using a program that conflicts with it, but then when you close that program it will automatically enable it again.

A similar procedure could be followed with compiz if effects are enabled. Bring a notification telling the user that it was closed (be sure that it stays out of the way if it pops up behind a full-screen app though), and replace the decorator with metacity (in case they use a composite decorator such as emerald). Then when the app is closed, enable compiz again.

Great idea :)

johan wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 23:19
I do use fusion-icon but I would like a more seamless hassle-free solution, so this is why I posted this idea. The idea about having Compiz automatically shutdown (and startup afterwards again of cours) could also be done by detecting openGL being used somewhere else. I did consider this too, and that would be awesome, but I do think that my solution would be a simple quick fix for the issue, and therefore more realistic to be implemented. I guess you could add this sort of setting in the deb-package too.

luisromangz wrote on the 6 Mar 08 at 19:45
I think this should be handled in a Compiz plugin.

ariendj wrote on the 16 Mar 08 at 01:11
Good stuff. I really like compiz and I really don't like having to turn it off to play a 3D game.

coryg wrote on the 20 Mar 08 at 00:16
This would be an incredibly useful feature

Denis wrote on the 3 Apr 08 at 13:14
It would be useful to fix some problems.

However, I think that compiz should be designed to not influence other graphic applications (too much).

Also I would like to be able to task switch, even when working fullscreen. Meaning that either Compiz has to be restarted every time I switch to another application or my desktop graphics will work slow (without compiz).

Generally, I don't think this fix would be future-proof. It would be better to make improvements to Compiz, so other programs don't suffer from the hardware-accelerated desktop.

artir wrote on the 13 Apr 08 at 11:44
I have good news, guys. Compiz people are working on DRI2 support... This means we can play any OpenGL game while using compiz WITHOUT any problem. :)

Psycho_zs wrote on the 4 Aug 08 at 10:33
will it fix slow framerate?

for example: UrbanTerror fps counter shows something like 80 fps with both metacity and compiz. But actual framerate with compiz in this game is around 20 fps or even less, despite counter shows same 80 fps.

(NV 6600GT, nvidia-glx)

andruk (Idea reviewer) wrote on the 13 Oct 08 at 21:58
This would be even better if Compiz was disabled per-application. And totally awesome if there was a notification window that popped out from the titlebar of the window explaining what was going on and why.

Obviously this wouldn't work for fullscreen apps.

+1 for the original idea though.

Emil wrote on the 27 Oct 08 at 14:21
A good solution is a script or something, called compiz-disable or something. So to run a game from the menu, the default command to start it would be: "compiz-disable /usr/bin/my-game" or something...
The script just disables compiz on startup and enables compiz when the game is finished.

saivann (Brainstorm moderator) wrote on the 8 Feb 09 at 05:09
It is now possible to run 3D applications such as Google Earth with any compiz plugin without getting any weird behavior with some intel and ati cards!

If anyone want to alpha test jaunty current alpha release, feedbacks are still needed in launchpad bug report in order to confirm that this bug is definitively fixed :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/96991

jiu wrote on the 3 Mar 09 at 21:40
I find it surprising that you have no developer with xorg experience. I understand it's a hard one but it's almost as important as the kernel to the general linux crowd.

lotif wrote on the 7 Mar 09 at 16:37
Ok, maybe jaunty will fix this, but i still miss an easy way to switch off compiz...

Lachu wrote on the 22 Mar 09 at 13:22
In my opinion, it should be way like in description. Imagine, that we want just playing game, which rotate camera/scroll map on screen corners or FPS. We can of course, disabling Compiz corners when the apps will display in full screen mode.

jeypeyy wrote on the 22 Mar 09 at 18:17
seems like compiz 0.8.2 works a lot better with games.

lotif:
There is compiz fusion icon.

Oli wrote on the 12 May 09 at 09:22
This is fairly simple to do on your own.

All you need to do is run "metacity --replace" before you launch the app and "compiz --replace" afterwards.

You could either edit your launchers to run those two command before and after your main binary, or you could write a little script that you passed the game binary path (and edit your launchers to use the script).

AFarris01 wrote on the 21 May 09 at 01:30
@ Oli:

If it's already 'so simple' to do through the command line, then it shouldn't be so hard to put it as an option under the context menu, or under a launcher's preferences either.

I personally did write a script that did exactly this, because I needed it launching some games through wine, which would otherwise perform badly, or refuse to launch with compositing. Problem was this script wasn't quite as 'simple' as I originally assumed, and it still doesn't work as I'd like it to. I already knew a bit about bash scripting, and I had to do some serious reading to get a decent cohesive script working for me...God help somebody with no scripting experience at all.

Shikaku wrote on the 3 Jul 09 at 22:09
@AFarris01

I made the script.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7548627

Enjoy. It works by disabling when a program is running. Also works by disabling on battery.

slsolaris wrote on the 15 Jul 09 at 17:29
if you are working on this:
Selected solution (#2): Disable compiz automatically before using 3D apps/games

you have somethings to think, it can not be really like that... for example, if you begins to play gnome chess in 3D is it really necessary to turn compiz off??it just came to my mind, think about it

kiki wrote on the 19 Jul 09 at 12:35
great idea


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