Poor 3d application performance under unity-2d

[hdpq]

Running Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity-2D. Video card: nvidia GeForce 8600 M GT, driver version: 270.41.06.

Tried running Nexuiz (glx, sdl and windows executable via Wine) and Left4Dead (via Wine) under Unity-2D and every time both the games would become unresponsive with around 0.25 frames per second after some time (5-10 seconds after loading a map - menus work alright) and dramatically slow down the whole system. Interestingly enough, some maps in Nexuiz worked fine whereas others froze the game. After shutting down the games (e.g. summoning the console and typing 'quit') the overall performance was restored to its normal level.

What led me to think this is Unity-2D-specific is that when launching Nexuiz on a separate X server, no performance degradation is observed. Furthermore, using Gnome Classic (No Effects) also delivers great performance in both the applications.

I'm unsure as to the reason behind such behavior of the mentioned applications, but it seems that those with less advanced graphics (World of Padman, Neverball) experience no performance loss.

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

Update: tried the default Ubuntu session (Unity 3d with default Compiz configuration) and all the mentioned applications ran smoothly.

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

Update: playing with Compiz effects caused Unity to start crashing violently, so I reset Compiz settings to default using
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz-1
and restarted my computer. Oddly enough, Nexuiz and L4D are running perfectly well now.

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

*That is, they are running perfectly well on Unity-2D now.

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Thanks a lot for reporting in such a detailed manner the issue.
According to your latest update the bug report is not valid anymore?

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

Technically, it is "fixed". However, my approach was mostly trial and error (i.e. I was trying to restore the functionality of Unity (3D) + Compiz, not knowing what I had broken in the first place).

To my mind the best scenario would be to find out what causes the issue (could anyone else reproduce it?) and what the proper solution is.

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

Another small update: I noticed that if the mouse should somehow leave the 3d app window (I play Nexuiz and L4D in Windowed mode, so during loading time or with console open it's possible to get outside of the window), the system would become terribly slow until the application is shut down, as described in my first post.

[hdpq (defectoscopny)]

UPDATE: so I've been looking for a cure to video tearing and found that adding to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf the following code:

Section "Extensions"
       Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

#As far as I know, this only works for nVidia graphics cards

fixed the screen tearing (and the 3d app performance, too) in Unity-2D. Now my movies, my projectM visualizations and games (notably Warsow, which used to freeze right after a match start) run at normal FPS without tearing or performance degradation.

This so-called improvement, however, comes at a price - Compiz and Metacity compositing features are killed.
In the light of using Unity-2D I couldn't care less about Compiz, although I'm concerned about Metacity. Turning off Compositing and Metacity Window Theme from Ubuntu-Tweak's "Window Manager Settings" menu and rebooting/issuing the "metacity --replace" command had no impact on video/3D performance.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.