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up vote 7 down vote favorite

I was using gnome-shell and I forgot I wasn't using Compiz. I didn't pay all that much attention to my battery life as I think I was plugged in. Has anyone taken notice of the resource consumption of the two rendering methods?

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I've not made stats, but it seems that Mutter really needs more resources to work... For example, running it in my Virtualbox environment while Unity and compiz work flawlessly Gnome Shell hangs. Those aren't real stats BTW :P – Treviño Jul 19 '11 at 15:52

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

I havent found anyone who has done a direct Mutter vs Compiz resource usage study.

Its arguable that Phoronix has done the closest to this looking recently at performance comparison between gnome-shell (Mutter), unity (compiz) & KWin using both NVIDIA and ATI graphics.

My reading of the results - and making the assumption that better performance is equivalent to less resource usage for the same work - is that gnome-shell and unity were perhaps equally resource hungry when using NVIDIA drivers, whereas gnome-shell using ATI was more resource hungry than Unity.

However, KWin was better than both gnome-shell and unity.

Usual caveats should apply when trying to interpret Phoronix results & methodologies - arguments should be directed to the Phoronix forums!

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