Several users have reported that the GUI (graphical user interface) of Ardour 4.x is slow on their systems. We know that this is caused by a combination of video interfaces and the driver for the video interface, but we don't know which video interfaces or which drivers are to blame. By default Ardour 4.x tries to get the video hardware to accelerate drawing, which may or may not happen depending on the card and driver.

To further track down various issues related to this, debug-builds (either from http://nightly.ardour.org/ or self-builds without --optimize) now allow to override this. (since Ardour 4.0-217)

If you feel that you are seeing slow GUI performance or drawing glitches/artifacts, please try:

export ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1 Ardour4

or

cd /gtk2_ardour; ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1 ./ardev

Questions we're interested in getting a range of answers to:

Is there a significant difference to responsiveness (scroll/zoom)?

What is the total CPU usage when playing with follow-playhead, mixer+meters (compare with and without ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE=1). The interesting part is the sum of X11/xorg + Ardour CPU usage.

People who had visual rendering artifacts, with ARDOUR_IMAGE_SURFACE set they should be gone. It'd be great to get confirmation of that.

When telling us about your results, be sure to include the type of video interface/card you are using, and anything you may know about the driver

Thanks in advance for helping investigating this.