Gregory's Server
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Got some initial results on the terminals. As expected, VTE is *really slow* on big window sizes on Wayland due to Cairo and weird repaint timing logic. But what is Black Box doing to lose more than a refresh cycle? Glad to see Alacritty still on top, but apparently Foot is a tiny bit faster on this test. Kitty loses one refresh cycle for some reason. Added Contour terminal (how come there are so many new terminal engines written from scratch lately, yet no new GTK 4 terminal widget?) Now for something different: emulators! Here "New Highscore" is the work-in-progress Highscore rewrite @alice is working on, "Old Highscore" is the current latest Highscore git commit, and "GNOME Games" is the latest Games from Flathub. It's quite interesting how RetroArch seems to have a two-frame spread rather than one, something's off in its processing. Also interesting how MGBA is one frame slower than Gambatte. For Highscore, good to see GTK 4 improving the latency. Today I've been visited by kchibisov (Alacritty maintainer) and we've spent several hours benchmarking terminals and editors. 😴 For this test we measured a complex drawing test from vtebench[1]. Key press fills the screen with a complex pattern. I measure the latency from the key press to seeing the pattern at the end of the screen. Foot ended up firmly ahead, followed by Kitty and Alacritty. Other terminals struggle a bit more with it. Moar measurements: compositors. Since for this test the key presses are slow and there's no continuous redrawing, this should boil down to the amount of work a compositor does on screen update. Un-vsynced X11 is obviously the fastest; thankfully work to add tearing flips to kernel and Wayland is ongoing. Surprised to see GNOME Shell be a bit slower than raw Mutter, especially in fullscreen, since it doesn't really do much extra there. Extra surprised GNOME X11 is faster; might be noise. You might've heard that VTE got faster in GNOME 46. But how much faster? I measured it with a hardware input latency tester! The answer is: *a lot* faster. Read all about it here: https://bxt.rs/blog/just-how-much-faster-are-the-gnome-46-terminals/ For anyone following along, this is also finally the blog post where I explain in some detail how the latency tester works and what is shown on the plots. |
This time I wanted to do some more thorough looking at the data before deciding on the thresholding approach, but it seems that the plotly frontend starts to really struggle when you feed it several seconds of data sampled multiple times per millisecond 🙃