GNOME 3.32 performance (Ubuntu 19.04)

vanvugt · March 14, 2019, 4:01am

As you may have read, GNOME 3.32 has been released and with it performance improvements in gnome-shell and mutter. This is all in Ubuntu 19.04 which is due for release in April.

However I would like to clarify a few things…

3.32 includes these performance improvements:

Smoother icon spring animation (although we’ve patched that into 19.04 and 18.10 already, soon 18.04 too)
High frame rate monitor support (although we’ve patched that into 19.04 and 18.10 already, soon 18.04 too)
Smoother desktop zoom magnifier panning (although we’ve patched that into 19.04 and 18.10 already, soon 18.04 too)
Avoided blocking IO here and here that interrupted GUI smoothness.
and more from other people that I might have missed.

3.32 does not include these:

Any reduction in latency (here or here) or missed frames (and later this). Although I’m trying to get some of those patched into Ubuntu 19.04.
Significantly reduced CPU impact for cursor movement.
High performance multi-monitor support in Wayland sessions
Fixes for other problems identified as stutter and high CPU usage.

sleepynico · April 20, 2019, 6:28am

I will say on ryzen system its a lot smoother than previous version of gnome 3 and evenly smoother kde and mate. I notice my system is snappy without problem drivers are up to date for my amd gpu and my other system is a lot better too as well.

Rodhos · April 20, 2019, 1:47pm

Nice job! Thank you very much. I can notice the difference.

mohan-ram · April 20, 2019, 2:00pm

Yes the new Mesa stack helps with AMD/ATi GPU (which my laptop has). Great release.

jyaku · April 21, 2019, 7:30am

The cursor movement patch is the one that I would love to see soon.

lakerssuperman · May 9, 2019, 11:16pm

This is great to see. I’ve been hoping for Gnome performance improvements for some time. It was great to see the work put into Gnome 3.32.

I’m curious, the list of outstanding items that didn’t make it into 3.32, while those potentially be backported to 19.04 as they are fixed? And, if what kind of time frame would that entail? I’d love to continue to get the benefits of this performance tuning without having to wait for Gnome 3.34.

Wishful thinking, perhaps. Great work thus far though. Thank you.

vanvugt · May 10, 2019, 1:30am

We are already backporting performance fixes to stable Ubuntu releases as those fixes mature.

However, at the moment there are no newer performance fixes that have landed in 3.34 yet that would need backporting to 3.32 for Ubuntu 19.04. I do expect and hope that 3.34 will perform noticeably better than 3.32 in the end.

lakerssuperman · May 10, 2019, 2:09am

Awesome!! Thank you. I’m really enjoying using 19.04.

copong · May 13, 2019, 10:15am

Same here, great work made on 3.32. Performance still tanks though on multimonitor setups, janky animations and whatnot. I know work is ongoing on alleviating these issues, but how close to completion is it I wonder?

vanvugt · May 14, 2019, 1:29am

There is a lot of performance work in progress, and planned. In fact I will be in a hurry to get it all into Ubuntu 20.04 by next year.

As significant milestones are met, they will be announced on this site. Most likely in the weekly desktop status reports.

If you want to track the long term progress then you can follow these pages:
[ stutter | latency | CPU ]

copong · May 15, 2019, 3:31pm

Superb, this is great to hear. Really appreciate all the work you’re doing on Gnome @vanvugt. Thank you.

vanvugt · May 23, 2019, 6:37am

GNOME 3.34 performance (Ubuntu 19.10)

sibe39 · June 12, 2019, 9:02pm

Gnome 3.32 is ok but stop snap please ! deb package is better.