Compiz does not allow window shadows more than 18px in radius

[Owais Lone]

It is not possible to use more than 18px shadows for the window borders. It would be nice if Compiz didn't limit this number.

Plugin: Window Decorations
Version: 1:0.9.8.4-0ubuntu3 (Ubuntu 12.10)

[Sam Spilsbury (smspillaz)]

Its intentional, anything more than that really hits performance quite badly.

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

Shouldn't this be a bug to fix the performance issue then? I think mutter supports big shadows without too much performance degradation (elementry's pantheon) and so does OS X.

Can we at least change the importance to low or wishlist as someone might want to tackle the performance issue and make it possible.

Thanks!

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I thought I logged a bug for this already...?

Yeah I agree performance may be the reason, but it's not an excuse. A texture of any size should not incur significant performance penalty.

[Javier Melero (ricmelero)]

Is this a regretion?, I am using ubuntu 11.04, which uses unity-windows-decorator (I think it was a fork of gtk-windows-decorator) with 45px shadows and there isn't any performance issue, in fact compiz runs much faster than it does on ubuntu 12.x, that's the one of the main reasons why I didn't update since 11.04.

[Javier Melero (ricmelero)]

I forgot to mention that I really want this to be solved, I know that it's a minor issue and it isn't a functional bug, but it was working without problem in previous versions, so I think that could be solved.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Also, as far as I know, the window decorations (including shadows) are generated by gtk-window-decorator once and live in the X server as pixmaps thereafter. It's not like we're regenerating the shadows all the time... (?)

I can't see what the performance penalty would be.

[MC Return (mc-return)]

Sam, is it safe (performance-wise) to fix this now ?