KWin Can Cause A Performance Hit Too, But It’s Different From Compiz

“Last week we published Arch Linux vs. Ubuntu benchmarks to
finally lay to rest that for the overall system performance the
speed of the rolling Arch Linux distribution is not too different
from that of Ubuntu when running with similar package versions. One
of the areas, however, where the performance was different with the
“out of the box” experience was the OpenGL gaming where Ubuntu was
using Compiz by default where as Arch had Metacity. This surprised
many so we published another article entitled The Cost Of Running
Compiz where we showed the performance penalties of a compositing
window manager with different hardware and drivers. This led some
to ask whether the performance of KWin also causes the OpenGL
frame-rate to drop, so here are those KDE benchmarks.

“Our KWin testing was done with the same hardware and software
as last week’s tests. This included an Intel Core i3 530 processor
clocked at 3.32GHz, an ECS H55H-M motherboard, 2GB of system
memory, and a 65GB OCZ Vertex SSD. When testing the Intel graphics
we used the integrated Clarkdale graphics, for the ATI graphics we
used a Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, and for the NVIDIA graphics
was a GeForce 9800GT. The testing was done on a stock Kubuntu 10.04
installation with the Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64 kernel, KDE
4.4.2, X.Org Server 1.7.6, Mesa 7.7, xf86-video-intel 2.9.1,
xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, Catalyst 10.4, and NVIDIA 195.36.15
drivers.”

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