Beryl and Compiz are two windows managers for Linux that offers that little extra. A lot of eye candy that requires little performance in exchange. There is a big but however, and that is that not all graphics circuits work well with Beryl and some require a lot of work to even start. At Phoronix they’ve taken a look at a number of graphics circuits and what kind of performance they offer with Beryl. They’ve chosen to test under Ubuntu 7.04, which unfortunately isn’t the most stable for Beryl, but still the perhaps most common distribution to use when running Beryl.
Alas, the scenario is as expected with the Radeon series, the big loser of the test. The only card that offers acceptable performance is the X800 series. All other cards are not quite capable of handling a large amount of effects at the same time.
Intel’s GMA 3000 circuit, found in the 965 series, offers more than enough performance for running Beryl. The only thing that speaks against it was that they ran into a bug during the testing where the window simply disappeared. Other than that it was a piece of cake.
When it comes to NVIDIA it was a real dream. All cards of the GeForce 6 series and up are perfectly fine for running Beryl, with all kinds of effects.
When it comes to the Radeon X1000 series there is currently no support, that is if you don’t make work-around using the X.org drivers, but this will hopefully change in the “near” future.
