[Android1]

Earlier this week we published benchmarks comparing Arch Linux and Ubuntu. There were only a few areas where the two Linux distributions actually performed differently with many of their core packages being similar, but one of the areas where the results were vastly different was with the OpenGL performance as Ubuntu uses Compiz by default (when a supported GPU driver is detected) where as Arch does not. This had surprised many within our forums so we decided to carry out a number of tests with different hardware and drivers to show off what the real performance cost is of running Compiz as a desktop compositing manager in different configurations.

Even when OpenGL games and benchmarks are running full-screen, in some configurations there still is a penalty imposed by Compiz. Compiz does not stop itself when a game or application is running full-screen even though you are not using any Compiz plug-ins or desktop effects and as such, indirect rendering is still being used. Albeit using a compositing window manager can be of some benefit when running a full-screen OpenGL program as it can lead to faster alt-switching and some other advantages, but for most users running Compiz with a full-screen application is not needed and can simply lead to a drop in performance due to the indirect rendering and additional steps taken with the compositing window manager on Linux.

Our test system was running 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.

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