3D windows hang temporarily on focus change

[Nilith]

Hi,

I am seeing issues where OpenGL (and wine-boxed d3d) locks up temporarily (no redraw is being done) on window manager focus switches; no game logic runs if the game is singlethreaded (obviously).

Creating a tool widget somewhere and tearing it down again (with the implied focus switch) is sufficient to un-lock the 3D renderer - e.g., just opening a right-click popup somewhere and closing it again works fine.

However, it is extremely annoying, as the reverse is also a problem: Any game played stops as soon as any OSD (for example, amarok currently playing) pops up, and resumes as soon as the popup disappears.

I cannot reproduce this behaviour with glxgears; however, with Neverwinter Nights (the only game I play frequently) it happens all the time, as does it with wine-started D3D games.

I have observed this behaviour on all kernels since 2.6.18 (though it did not necessarily start with that version), and on all NVIDIA driver releases I care to throw an axe at.

I am running a quad-head xinerama setup with two 7900GT driving the screens, on openbox (though the issues are with kwin too) - also, find the bug-report attached below.

How can I help to fix this?

[Nilith]

Bump.

Ubuntu 10.4 with metacity or openbox exhibits the same issues. Installed two 9500GT meanwhile, setup is otherwise the same.

Happens with VMWare Player too (presumably when it uses some GL context for 3d drawing/passthrough). Especially when toggling fullscreen mode.

Reproducible with all drivers including the newest 256 beta, but running the 10.4-distributed driver for now.

This is bloody annoying.

[Nilith]

Some more research:

This describes the exactly same symptoms I am seeing.

Also, I've set openbox to do "focus follows mouse". If I disable that, everything seems to work fine (except my sanity). Hunh.

This gave me the idea to try that out, although I don't know in what way it relates to what I am seeing. The referenced ubuntu bug agains nvidia-* is flagged as fixed, although I am clearly still seeing it.

Any tips? Is it a bug, is it a feature?

[bones_was_here]

I see a problem similar to this, but only as per the following case (never yet with a wine game):

• I start Nexuiz (2.5.2 GLX x64 client configured with vid_netwmfullscreen=1)
• I attempt to task switch with alt+tab or by hotkeying to another virtual desktop
• Nearly every time, this results in all applications being drawn at less than 1fps, which is pretty unusable
• If I switch back to Nexuiz, framerate returns to normal
• Subsequent task switches do not cause this problem - it only occurs on the first task switch after starting the game

I'm using a GTX275, kernel 2.6.31.13 (vanilla), xserver 1.7.7 and KDE 4.4.4 with KWin's composition enabled on Debian Sid.
This problem occurs with drivers 256.35, 256.29, the 195 series, the 190 series, and probably earlier drivers that I don't remember.

[Licaon]

Originally Posted by bones_was_here

I'm using a GTX275, kernel 2.6.31.13 (vanilla), xserver 1.7.7 and KDE 4.4.4 with KWin's composition enabled on Debian Sid.

What is UnredirectFullscreen= set to in ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc for you ?
If it's not set do try with UnredirectFullscreen=true and false ( restart the X server after you modify this)

[bones_was_here]

UnredirectFullscreen is not set, I believe it defaults to enabled (there's a noticeable flicker on a task switch with composition enabled, the same as happens when switching xv to fullscreen). I'll try playing with the setting some when I get home, but disabling it is probably not an option as performance is worse when running the game in a window.

[Nilith]

I don't think those two problems are related.

Mine seems to be somehow related to Xinerama. It doesn't happen with twinview (which I can't use because I have four screens and I don't care about running two window managers). I haven't tried xrandr yet, and don't know if it is even applicable.