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  • Daniel van Vugt's avatar
    js/ui: Choose some actors to cache on the GPU · f77b3da7
    Daniel van Vugt authored and Jonas Ådahl's avatar Jonas Ådahl committed
    Flag some actors that are good candidates for caching in texture memory
    (what Clutter calls "offscreen redirect"), thereby mostly eliminating
    their repaint overhead.
    
    This isn't exactly groundbreaking, it's how you're meant to use
    OpenGL in the first place. But the difficulty is in the design of
    Clutter which has some peculiarities making universal caching
    inefficient at the moment:
    
     * Repainting an offscreen actor is measurably slower than repainting
       the same actor if it was uncached. But only by less than 100%,
       so if an actor can avoid changing every frame then caching is usually
       more efficient over that timeframe.
    
     * The cached painting from a container typically includes its children,
       so you can't cache containers whose children are usually animating at
       full frame rate. That results in a performance loss.
         This could be remedied in future by Clutter explicitly separating a
       container's background painting from its child painting and always
       caching the background (as StWidget tries to in some cases already).
    
    So this commit selects just a few areas where caching has been verified
    to be beneficial, and many use cases now see their CPU usage halved:
    
    One small window active...... 10% -> 7% (-30%)
    ...under a panel menu........ 23% -> 9% (-61%)
    One maximized window active.. 12% -> 9% (-25%)
    ...under a panel menu........ 23% -> 11% (-52%)
    ...under a shell dialog...... 22% -> 12% (-45%)
    ...in activities overview.... 32% -> 17% (-47%)
    (on an i7-7700)
    
    Also a couple of bugs are fixed by this:
    
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792634
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792633
    f77b3da7