Gnome-Shell 2D

[r0n1N]

Hello,

I've just installed Fedora 17 since there is now gnome-shell 2D support. Is there any possibility to switch between hardware-accelerated (3D) mode and the new 2D-mode?

Or can you tell me how to disable 3D hardware acceleration of my graphics card using the radeon driver. I have an on-board Radeon HD3300 (RS780) and I'd like to try if gnome-shell was working more smoothly if i used the CPU to render it.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Ssl]

Hi,
Are you talking about "software rendering" ?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAxMTI
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Featur...ware_rendering

can you try this from gnome-terminal: LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome-shell --replace

It will probably work pretty slow.If fallback mode is good enough for you, you could enable
it through "system settings" -> "details" -> "graphics" -> forced fallback mode on" as a second option..

[r0n1N]

Thanks! That is what I was talking about. Sadly, it is pretty slow as you already mentioned.

However, it is not really much slower than using hardware-rendering. Can you imagine that the Radeon HD3300 graphics card is just too weak for the gnome-shell effects? (e.g. switching between exposé and normal view is very stutteringly) Or is there any possibility to the driver properties? I already checked the fglrx driver, but did not bring any improvement ...

[Ssl]

Is there any chance you did f17 install from live media using vesa mode? That is if you have
"nomodeset" or radeon.modeset=0 param appended to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line in /etc/default/grub file.

Binary driver (catalyst) is incompatible, so far, with xorg stack used in f17, so, your try is wrong with that.

Interesting, in a few days I could test an hp 615 notebook with ati radeon hd 3200 (RS780) graphics from f17 liveusb and will post my results here, later we could file a bug report if I have the same experience too.

[r0n1N]

No I don't think so, here is the excerpt from the grub file:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 SYSFONT=True  KEYTABLE=de rd.luks=0 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rhgb quiet"

Would be nice to see your experience. I might be a bit oversensitive, however on a fedora machine of a friend it seemed to be much smoother. He's running a 2 year old geforce middle class graphic card. Though, it isn't the newest you can get but probably faster than mine ...

In addition, it is not only f17 with gnome-shell making these problems. Actually all current distributions running gnome-shell, unity 3d or kde do not run very smooth.

[Agent20]

You could check in the BIOS to see if there are any settings for memory sharing with the onboard graphics.
If the onboard graphics is only allocated a relatively small amount of memory (like 128MB) that might cause stuttering performance issues across different distros.

[r0n1N]

Thanks for the hint, I will check it. Any proposals how much memory I should allocate at least?

@Ssl: did make any experiences with the notebook yet?

[Agent20]

The amount of memory to allocate will depend on the BIOS options for your motherboard and how much RAM you have in the PC, I would try for at least 256MB.

My laptop with Mobility HD3450 graphics (256MB) runs the GNOME shell animations smoothly, a discrete 9600 Pro desktop card (128MB) stutters a bit and a motherboard with the Xpress 200 onboard graphics (32MB) stutters badly. They can't be compared directly of course because of differences in architecture and the specifications of the rest of the systems they are in.

[droidhacker]

What is your objective in trying to make it "smoother"? Are you trying to make it *look* prettier? Or are you trying to make it faster/more functional? If the latter, you might want to consider installing the "disable window animations" extension.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extensi...ow-animations/

[r0n1N]

Actually, it is the animations themselves that aren't smooth. So my objective is to make it "look" prettier

However, switching to 1024MB of RAM did not help either (it was set to "Auto", so probably there was enough anyways). It is not that bad (as I said, I am probably too oversensitive) but it feels like it is getting worse if more windows are open.