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Top-level
 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. 6 comments
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. |
Gregory's Server
Added Contour terminal (how come there are so many new terminal engines written from scratch lately, yet no new GTK 4 terminal widget?)