Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?
In May of last year, I published an article entitled The Cost Of Running Compiz. Since it's been nearly one year since those tests were carried out, and the Linux graphics drivers have advanced a great deal, particularly the open-source Gallium3D drivers, I have performed a new set of benchmarks to see if running Compiz with full-screen games at the server's native resolution still hurts the overall performance. The Compiz performance is also becoming more important since this compositing window manager is to play a critical role in Canonical's Unity Desktop for Ubuntu 11.04.
For this testing, Ubuntu 10.10 was used as the Linux distribution, but Compiz 0.9.4 was tested, which is the version currently used by Ubuntu 11.04. The latest open-source and closed-source graphics drivers were also used. The performance with various drivers and graphics cards were compared between running Compiz and Metacity with the GNOME 2.32 desktop.