[Ardour-Users] ardour 4 // slow graphical interface

[Robin Gareus]

On 04/25/2015 12:38 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Chris Caudle <chris at chriscaudle.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, April 24, 2015 4:49 pm, Neil wrote:
>>> One of the reasons I bought the laptop I did was that I thought there
>> were
>>> good free and open drivers for that family of video card [ATI/AMD]
>>
>> Is the new Ardour graphic code using OpenGL for 2D acceleration?
> 
> 
> No. All our graphics are done using Cairo. We do not use Cairo's
> recently-added GL surfaces.
> 

Ardour uses the cairo-context provided by gtk which is a x11-surface by
default (which may or may not be accelerated depending on x11/graphics
card etc)

To further track down various issues mentioned in this thread,
debug-builds (either from http://nightly.ardour.org/ or self-builds
without --optimize) now allow to override this. (since Ardour 4.0-217)


Please try

  export ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1
  Ardour4

or

  cd <ardour-src>/gtk2_ardour; ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1 ./ardev


1) Is there a significant difference to responsiveness (scroll/zoom)?

2) What is the total CPU usage when playing with follow-playhead,
   mixer+meters (compare with and without ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1).
   The interesting part is the sum of X11/xorg + Ardour CPU usage.

3) People who had visual rendering artifacts, with ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE
set they should be gone. It'd be great to get confirmation of that.


thanks in advance for helping investigating this.

Cheers!
robin