Sublime Forum

[SOLVED] Slow Rendering on Gentoo GNU/Linux with KDE

#1

I’m using Sublime Text 2 build 2095 under Gentoo Linux and KDE. For some reason, the rendering of the text buffer is annoyingly slow. In particular, scrolling the buffer exposes some very noticeable horizontal striping, and typed characters take a fraction of a second to appear.

I previously used Sublime 2 under Kubuntu, and it had the normal snappy and crisp experience, so it’s most likely a problem with my system’s configuration.

Are there any external dependencies that I might be missing? I had to install libpng1.2 in order to get Sublime to start, but I’m wondering if there might be something else that I’m missing that’s causing Sublime to fall back to software rendering.

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#2

S2 does indeed always use software rendering.

Two things to check:

  • Do you have any plugins installed? Some can cause slowdowns.
  • What color depth is your screen? S2 emits 32 bit RGB values, if you’re screen is set to, say, 16 bit color depth, then the conversion may be hurting you.
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#3

Hmm. Well, I’ve changed around the color depth settings in my xorg.conf, all the way up to 24-bit color depth, with no effect. If I go any higher, X informs me on startup that my hardware driver (i810) does not support it. However, on the same hardware running kubuntu, I didn’t have this issue. I’m going to keep looking at my driver setup to see if I’m missing something.

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#4

Well, as far as I can tell, it appears to be a regression in the newer versions of the intel driver for XFree86 or the kernel intel driver. They’e changed up the direct rendering system, and it’s not fully optimized yet. So, it should go away with time.

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#5

I’m happy to report that moving to kernel 3.0.4 resolved this issue.

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