Thats a decent guess - 5.8 is rather new and your hardware is rather old.
(3rd gen intel)
I doubt it will get much benefit from new kernels … and might even hit regressions.
If I were you I might find a good LTS and stick there
(until checking the next LTS, or for some feature you really want)
Still though … I think that besides that … TLP is one thing, as it wont be present in mint by default … so you could disable that too, and the other is the compositor … it can be tweaked or replaced … but for testing purposes you might try turning that off as well.
I’m talking to some guys on the lutris discord server, they said that I should try to disable xfce’s compositor, so I did, and it actually fixed it, it runs on-par with mint now. I don’t get it however, since Mint uses a lot of animations and crap that slow down the OS, but I didn’t notice an FPS improvement on games when I switched to XFCE with the compostior off there… It’s weird.
Well … I did mention it 3 or 4 times
And I still think its possible that on your Mint … you werent actually using XFWM compositor because of installing XFCE over Cinnamon.
As I said before - you can tweak XFCE’s compositor, or even replace it with a less crazy one like compton.
You could check those packages for fun, but probably not much profit.
Though who knows … it might return something mystifying.
I don’t think that I want any performance hit for some shadows on windows honestly. Most of the time I have applications maximized, so they don’t even show. I’ll try to disable the vulnerabilities and see if I really get that 50% performance improvement, on my chip you can guess how desperate I am for any extra frame.
Hah. fair enough … then yeah, remove all extra power/throttle stuff, etc.
Compositors are actually helpful … when done properly it can cut down on tearing.
(though raw-performance-wise … stopping tearing cuts against framerates … but why get 150fps if it clips, as opposed to 100 without?)
And … they do things like transparency on windows and such …
But yes - depending on need and setup … I used to either rock without one at all … or use something like compton to just do the ‘smoothing’ stuff, but no shadows or anything, so it didnt really cost much. (we are talking old atom netbooks here)
Also … if you want a quick ‘tune-me-up-scotty’ tool … take a look at this
(please either use default values or if you use script with --custom-values please research first)
Actually I think I may be better off if I find a way to disable it for games… lutris does have an option that reads “Disable desktop effects” which I guess means compositor, however it does not fix the lag. xfce settings have an option called “Display fullscreen overlays directly” which I guess means to turn it off on fullscreen apps, this doesn’t work either (it was already checked). I could try to set a script that runs when any game runs that disables it, but I wouldn’t know how to disable it with commands.
╰─ xfwm4 --compositor=off ─╯
xfwm4-Message: 20:57:49.664: Another Window Manager (Xfwm4) is already running on screen :0.0
xfwm4-Message: 20:57:49.664: To replace the current window manager, try "--replace"
(xfwm4:3106): xfwm4-WARNING **: 20:57:49.664: Could not find a screen to manage, exiting
Adding the --replace option to the command seems to have done it… however the command doesn’t exit.
If I exit the command manually with Ctrl+C the screen flashes and retains the setting (if the command said to turn it off, it keeps off, and viceversa). If I put the & at the end I guess that makes it run in the background, but then I would have to find the process in task manager to close it right? Couldn’t it have problems to keep it running in the background? As I would like to disable it when I run the game, and enable it when exiting it.
Ok you’re officially god in my eyes now. Thanks, from the bottom of my heart, honestly.
Btw, if anyone wants to make pre-launch and post-launch scripts for lutris, I recommend setting it to false/true respectiveley instead of toogling it, this is how you’d do that:
This could be nice if I can’t/prefer not to run the game with lutris, thanks again!
EDIT: Hmm… lutris doesn’t seem to run the scripts. Could be a permissions thing? The log doesn’t show anything, and if I manually run them, they do work both, and they do have the desired effects (framerate increases).