Performance Tips

General

• CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS defaults to 60. While this is adequate for many displays, some displays are off by a fraction of 1 Hz. If your display's refresh rate is 59.97 Hz, then setting CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS=59.97 in /etc/environment can improve input latency.

Nvidia

• Use "Allow Flipping" in Nvidia Settings. This allows OpenGL to swap buffers, which is needed by the method Muffin uses for syncing to vblank.
• "Sync to VBlank" in nvidia-settings needs to be enabled to prevent tearing.
  • This may change if Muffin PR #335 makes the 4.0 merge window.
• CLUTTER_VBLANK=none will disable Muffin's vblank implementation. The only way to reduce tearing in this scenario is to enable Nvidia's "Force Composition Pipeline" setting, which could increase input latency compared to when CLUTTER_VBLANK is enabled, and flipping is enabled. This may vary depending on the hardware and the number of monitors in use.
• If desktop animations and movements are jittery, enabling TripleBuffer in xorg.conf can make compositor motion more fluid by adding a third buffer to vblanking.
  • See the complete documentation for Nvidia's Xorg configuration options.
• Setting the preferred PowerMizer mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance" can improve compositing performance, at the cost of increased power usage.

Mesa

• The CLUTTER_VBLANK=none work-around can work with Mesa as well if the TearFree option is enabled in the Xorg configuration. Ensuring CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS matches the display's exact refresh rate could be an alternative approach if input latency is the issue.
  • See Xorg configuration options for Intel and AMDGPU.