[SUGGESTION] Few ideas

1. ALT+ENTER = to toggle Fullscreen/Not fullscreen
2. Auto switching off of the Windows Aero when game is started (mb in the fullscreen only?). it would be nice for the game's perfomance.

2. Auto switching off of the Windows Aero when game is started (mb in the fullscreen only?). it would be nice for the game's perfomance.

There are a number of window managers that offer effects that hit performance and we'd really need to implement such a thing for several. I did cover this before:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=2685

To make it an automatic thing for Windows what you would need to have is the game starting by a shortcut and it is then set in the shortcut properties:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-v...ideo-game/

If Xonotic had a .lnk file included in the game directory with this option already set then Windows users could be advised to make use of this shortcut instead of running the exe file. If a Windows installer was developed (there is little interest in maintaining this currently) then a shortcut added to the Start Menu could automatically be set to do this.

The aero thing should be a windows option. Seek a program that can do that. It's certainly not Xonotic's job, it's a multiplatform game.

And to toggle fullscreen, you can bind a key to "toggle vid_fullscreen; vid_restart". Warning: this is slow. If you need a fast toggle, consider finding a solution to have "fake fullscreen" where the window is resized to fill the whole screen, and have vid_resizable 1.
Alt-enter is a windows thing AFAIK, so it wouldn't make more sense to make that the fullscreen toggle key rather than ctrl-f or f11 or whatever else.

EDIT: I think it's stupid and redundant to have every graphics-intensive program support disabling of all the "mainstream" WMs/compositors. That should be the WM's job, it would be much more elegant and much more practical for everyone.

for windows 7: right click the executable, properties->compatibility->disable desktop composition, press ok.

EDIT: I think it's stupid and redundant to have every graphics-intensive program support disabling of all the "mainstream" WMs/compositors. That should be the WM's job, it would be much more elegant and much more practical for everyone.

That is very true but unfortunately none of the WMs, even those that claim to offer an option, actually do it properly. For example KWin has 'suspend desktop effects for fullscreen windows'. It may disable desktop effects but doesn't deal with the performance hits. Annoying. In my experience of Compiz I can't really say if I ever had the WM working 100% correctly at any single time anyway.

We should suggest WM developers do this correctly but I do see some of the problems as being a mindset difference. Any 10% performance hit is considered irrelevant as it's less than an order of magnitude.

For KWin I've now started a feature request to deal with this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297146

Wonder if MS would do anything about this in Aero? Unlikely it has to be said. Particularly for an OpenGL game.

tZork said above your post that Aero can be disabled on a program-by-program basis.

It's really unfortunate that WM devs would implement bloatful features with no way to disable them when needed. Such a shame. If somebody's making a third party fix for this, they should publish it on github or something similar so that other programs may benefit from it without reinventing the wheel.

tZork said above your post that Aero can be disabled on a program-by-program basis.

Don't worry, I'd linked to something in my first post anyway . What I was talking about really was if there would ever even remotely be an automatic, univeral setting in Windows for all games. Unlikely. Even if they did there's chance they'll bugger it up and make it DirectX only.

I've also got automatic workarounds for KWin and Compiz but again game specific.

Having started that KWin bug after 6 minutes it got closed as 'worksforme'. I think the developer missed the point a little and suggested window rules would allow this to be accomplished. My benchmarks say no. Even if it did work it's no more elegant than my dbus calls in the Xonotic shell script:

Code:

if [[ "$(qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.compositingActive)" = "true" ]] ; then
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.toggleCompositing
fi

exec "$@" &
wait $!

if [[ "$(qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.compositingActive)" = "false" ]] ; then
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.toggleCompositing
fi

Rest assured I'm going to keep 'working' with them on this.

It's really unfortunate that WM devs would implement bloatful features with no way to disable them when needed. Such a shame. If somebody's making a third party fix for this, they should publish it on github or something similar so that other programs may benefit from it without reinventing the wheel.

Totally agreed. The way that each WM implements toggling on and off is different but each can be managed as a single or few lines of code and they'll know that already. Detecting a fullscreen game is trickier. What makes a fullscreen game special? It must do something or else a program like Fraps could not display FPS in games and not on your desktop.

The WM response is normally: "oh, you can disable this by going through 10 menus each time you want to load your game, or click some option that says it does and actually just prevents the game from drawing animated menus, menus it doesn't have anyway". Missing the point. We don't want to disable the EFFECTS, we want to totally BYPASS the entire compositing path. Probably doesn't matter though if they only play Gnome Hearts...

As much as I have utmost respect for the developers and the product, this shows the division we have on this:

keep in mind that this is a test of Game Rendering Performance and doesn’t tell anything about the performance of tasks that matter

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/20...rformance/

for windows 7: right click the executable, properties->compatibility->disable desktop composition, press ok.

Unfortunately, this option doesn't active in my Win7x64 Ultimate =(

  xon.png (Size: 26.38 KB / Downloads: 112)
But it works alright in other games :

  ezq.png (Size: 31.16 KB / Downloads: 110)

for windows 7: right click the executable, properties->compatibility->disable desktop composition, press ok.

Unfortunately, this option doesn't active in my Win7x64 Ultimate =(

But it works alright in other games :

Awesome, typical windows experience!

Apparently it's correlated with 64-bit programs. Because it toootally makes sense to disable that for 64 bit programs.

(Slightly off-topic) The thing that really pisses me off in Windows is automatic driver installation. Really fudged up my gpu for quite a while. It pissed me off so much I actually made a petition against this feature!

Gah right, windows is retarded that way. either use the 32 bit (the 64 bit does not really gain you anything unless you use maximum texture quality) or use small dummy app like the one attached to this post to turn areo off temporarily.

Source for the app, should anyone want to compile it themselves:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
int main()
{
    printf("Press any key to exit");
    getch();
    return 0;
}

I'm suprised it's that bad about the 32/64-bit issue. That makes no sense. Does the use of a shortcut allow you to work around the 64-bit instead of a dummy application? You might think that this could be resolved in a service pack in future as more and more games will become 64-bit just because of the memory limits.

So compositing remains a performance bottleneck on all platforms without some hacks. If anyone can come up with a way of identifying whether a window is a 3D game or not, regardless of platform, that would be great to hear, even if an intermediary kludged solution has to be used just to demonstrate it.

I don't agree that windowed mode should generally disable composition. Also, a WM has no way to know whether a window is a game or not.

Fullscreen mode on the other hand should quite clearly disable composition, but in working WMs this should already be the case. SUPPOSEDLY this is how it works on Windows.

On Linux this is a bit more difficult. Fullscreen is typically achieved by "OverrideRedirect" in games, as the newer methods for it are not cross platform but require a "modern" WM, and don't support screen resolution changes by XVidMode but only by XRandR, which has the nasty side effect of causing desktop icons to rearrange. And OverrideRedirect is evil: it causes the window to be totally unmanaged, and thus the window manager has no way to know that composition should be turned off, as it has no way to even see such windows.

If you use the "glx" binary on Linux, you can try to set vid_netwmfullscreen 1 and then vid_restart to try an alternate fullscreen method. But beware, it only supports the native screen resolution, and not a reduced one. I suppose when you use that, KWin should properly turn off composition.

The REAL solution for this would be to introduce a cross WM API to turn off composition while a process is running. Sort of like what Windows has with this properties window.

I don't agree that windowed mode should generally disable composition. Also, a WM has no way to know whether a window is a game or not.

Very true. Now in my discussion with KWin developers one opposing position has always been that fullscreen and non-fullscreen games should not be treated differently. I am very much with you however as we know that windowed can give a performance hit regardless of compositing or not. I would suggest that if a game needs to bypass compositing, fullscreen is what really matters.

Fullscreen mode on the other hand should quite clearly disable composition, but in working WMs this should already be the case.

There are other cases though which are a problem. For example 'fullscreen' modes in web browers, graphics viewers and similar. This is where the WMs differ from our viewpoint and why they don't offer this. KDE used to but 'most' users apparently didn't like it?

The REAL solution for this would be to introduce a cross WM API to turn off composition while a process is running.

Maybe freedesktop.org would be the correct body to work on such a standard?

Right now we have application specific hacks for Kwin, Compiz and Aero (32-bit only). There are applications that CAN tell if a game is running such as Fraps. You never get a Fraps framerate on your windows desktop do you? It might be closed source but that doesn't make it impossible to replicate the effect. Answers on a postcard if anyone has any clue.

I really value your knowledge on this problem area. There are some differences in standpoint to be overcome between game developers and window manager developers. This is where I am at with KWin on filing an issue on this. Any input you have would be brilliant:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297146