Tips to reduce opengl 3 & 4 frame-rate stuttering under Linux - linux

Question

In recent years I've developed several small games and applications for OpenLG 2 and ES.
I'm now trying to build a scene-graph based on opengl 3+ for casual “3D” graphics on desktop systems. (Nothing complex like the unreal- or crytec-engine in mind.)
I started my development with OsX 10.7 and was impressed by Apples recent ogl 3.2 release which achieves equivalent results compared to windows systems.
Otherwise the results for Linux are a disappointment. Even the most basic animation is stuttering and destroys the impression of reality. The results did not differ between the windows toolkits freeglut and glfw. (The Extensions are loaded with glew 1.7)
I would like to mention that I'm talking about the new opengl core, not the old opengl 2 render-path, which works fine under Linux but uses the cpu instead of the gpu for complex operations.
After watching professional demos like the “Unigine heaven demo” I think there is a general problem to use modern real-time 3D graphics with Linux.
Any suggestions to overcome this problem are very welcome.
UPDATE:
I'm using:
AMD Phenom II X6, Radeon HD57XX with latest proprietary drivers (11.8) and Unity(64Bit).
You could take my renderloop from the toolkit documentation:
do {
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
...
} while (!glfwGetKey(GLFW_KEY_ESC) && glfwGetWindowParam(GLFW_OPENED));
I'm using VBOs and all transformation stages are done with shaders. Animation timing is done with glfwGetTime(). This problem occurs in window and full-screen mode. I don't know if a composition manager interferes with full-screen applications. But it is also impossible to demand from the user to disable it.
Update 2:
Typo: I'm using a HD57XX card.
GLX_Extension: http://snipt.org/xnKg
PCI Dump: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
X Info: http://pastie.org/2507935
Update 3:
Disabling the composition manager reduces, but did not completely remove the stuttering.
(I replaced the standard window manager with "ubuntu classic without extensions")
Once a second the animation freezes and ugly distortions appear:
(Image removed - Not allowed to post Images.)
Although Vertical synchronisation is enabled in the driver and checked in the application.

Answer 1

Since you're running Linux we require a bit of detailed information:
Which hardware do you use?
Only NVidia, AMD/ATI and Intel offer 3D acceleration so far.
Which drivers?
For NVidia and AMD/ATI there are propritary (nvidia-glx, fglrx) and open source drivers (nouveau, radeon). For Intel there are only the open source drivers.
Of all open source 3D drivers, the Intel drivers offer the best quality.
The open source AMD/ATI drivers, "radeon" have reached an acceptable state, but still are not on par, performance wise.
For NVidia GPUs, the only drivers that makes sense to use productively are the propritary ones. The open source "nouveau" drivers simply don't cut it, yet.
Do you run a compositing window manager?
Compositing creates a whole bunch of synchronization and timing issues. Also (some of) the OpenGL code you can find in the compositing WMs at some places drives tears into the eyes of a seasoned OpenGL coder, especially if one has experience writing realtime 3D (game) engines.
KDE4 and GNOME3 by default use compositing, if available. The same holds for the Ubuntu Unity desktop shell. Also for some non-compositing WMs the default skripts start xcompmgr for transparency and shadow effects.
And last but not least: How did you implement your rendering loop?
A mistake oftenly found is, that a timer is used to issue redisplay events at "regular" intervals. This is not how it's done properly. Timer events can be delayed arbitrarily, and the standard timers are not very accurate by themself, too.
The proper way is to call the display function in a tight loop and measure the time it takes between rendering iterations, then use this timing to advance the animation accordingly. A truly elegant method is using one of the VSync extensions that delivers one the display refresh frequency and the refresh counter. That way instead of using a timer you are told exactly the time advanced between frames in display refresh cycle periods.