Comment 1 Joe Drew (not getting mail) 2011-09-27 14:34:32 PDT

It's ok for this to be only for OS X, since that's where people are most badly affected by battery-life concerns from using the discrete GPU.

Comment 2 rsx11m 2011-09-27 14:52:05 PDT

Corresponding Windows bug 667989, general discussion in bug 668552.

Comment 3 Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul] 2011-09-28 02:05:37 PDT

Joe can you provide the patch ?

Comment 4 Siddharth Agarwal [:sid0] (inactive) 2011-09-29 22:08:57 PDT

Created attachment 563655 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Let's just do it on all platforms.

Comment 5 Siddharth Agarwal [:sid0] (inactive) 2011-11-01 13:54:45 PDT

Mark, review ping?

Comment 6 Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) 2011-11-07 09:56:57 PST

this setting complicates helping users who may have performance issues unrelated to this setting.  So it would be nice to do this soon, and even push it down into version 9 (soon to be beta)


(In reply to Siddharth Agarwal [:sid0] from comment #4)
> Created attachment 563655 [details] [diff] [review] [diff] [details] [review]
> patch
> 
> Let's just do it on all platforms.

makes sense, because we have these other bug reports
Bug 693852 - High GPU usage with constant status bar animation and direct2d
Bug 668552 - Interface is unusable when GPU is busy ... Slow deletes, message viewing, address autocomplete
Bug 667989 - DirectWrite/Hardware Acceleration should be disabled by default (direct2d)

Comment 7 Mark Banner (:standard8) 2011-11-29 12:40:46 PST

Created attachment 577709 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v2

Having had a few discussions, we've confirmed that hardware acceleration doesn't have any significant benefit for Thunderbird in its normal use cases. Therefore drivers have agreed to disable hardware acceleration.

There is a second preference involved on Windows (gfx.direct2d.disabled) that we want to disable alongside the layers one, so I've updated your patch to include that.

This has r+a=me. I'll land these in a bit as I think you're busy at the moment.

Comment 8 Mark Banner (:standard8) 2011-11-29 12:50:07 PST

Checked in:

http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/1d249939cafe
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-aurora/rev/786b3e3abd0f
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/2f77787a4916

Comment 9 Mark Banner (:standard8) 2011-11-29 12:51:28 PST

*** Bug 667989 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10 Mark Banner (:standard8) 2011-11-29 12:53:47 PST

*** Bug 668552 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11 Mark Banner (:standard8) 2011-11-29 12:54:49 PST

*** Bug 693852 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12 :aceman 2011-11-29 23:53:45 PST

Great, this may fix a class of problems I was triaging.
However, just to be sure, will this disable also Direct2D usage?

Comment 13 Siddharth Agarwal [:sid0] (inactive) 2011-11-30 01:15:34 PST

It indeed does.

Comment 14 [Baboo] 2011-12-27 08:09:19 PST

This will lead to Windows users that previously had Directwrite text rendering to have GDI rendering again which might look/behave differently.

Comment 15 Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away) 2013-12-12 17:04:42 PST

bug 689742 comment 0 says the reason is that back then, GL layers triggered the discrete GPU on dual-GPU macs.

That's long not been the case anymore. You can safely turn on GL layers, that won't trigger the discrete GPU. What does trigger the discrete GPU is WebGL, and only during the lifetime of any WebGL context.

Comment 16 Magnus Melin 2013-12-13 12:10:32 PST

Yes, this was reverted in bug 950133.