Lagging video in fullscreen

[Qubesquark]

Having a real problem with jerky video on sports with anything beyond small screen in Firefox ESR. I have tried to replicate this on my other desktop box, which runs linux mint 21.3 on an AMD Ryzen 5 with Radion graphics X6 and 22.8 GB ram. Runs perfectly at full screen. But on my Qubes 4.2.4 desktop box it’s a no go. Here is what I have: 4.2.4 with the default kernel 6.12.11-1, default template debian12-xfce, using the stock Untrusted vm with settings of private storage 30GB max, initial mem of 900MB, max memory of 7000MB, default pvh mode. In Firefox I have turned off hardware acceleration in the General-Performance settings after reading a suggestion to another post in this forum. Running a speed test yields 325Mbps d/l with ProtonVPN running and a wireguard server. Using copper, not wifi. I am using this vm to view fast moving lacrosse games on plus.nll.com and as stated, they run fine on the lesser non-Qubes machine, but terribly on the Qubes machine.

I do have an unused AMD FirePro W5000DVI which I toyed with the idea of trying to get running. But after reading all of the problems others have had with nVidia drivers, I haven’t tried to make it work.

Not sure how to proceed from here.

[Vael_S]

Window Manager Tweaks, then turn off the composer and turn it back on.
This fixed many video lag issues I found.

If it’s not related to the composer, then check the RAM utilisation and assignment to the guest. You may be maxxed out using a resource hog like Firefox or Chrome.

If this does not work, then you may find you need to set the VideoRam for the machine. If it’s a standard guest you can do this using something like the following…
qvm-features GUESTVM gui-videoram-min $(($WIDTH * $HEIGHT * 4 / 1024))
qvm-features GUESTVM gui-videoram-overhead 0

otherwise, referr to the following.

Debian HVM - small screen resolution

Ok, I was able to fix the issue with resolution by increasing the qube’s video ram in Xen config. You can test whatever this will fix it for you as well by running these commands in dom0: sudo mkdir -p /etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name/ cat << 'EOF' | sudo tee /etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name/YourQubeName.xml <!-- import default template--> {% extends 'libvirt/xen.xml' %} <!-- we wanna alter the devices block --> {% block devices %} <!-- import default device block --> {…

This will set the VRAM as well.

Other than that, could use VirtualGL

Seamless GPU passthrough on Qubes OS with VirtualGL

We are presenting to you a guide regarding GPU passthrough created in collaboration with peers. Qubes OS already has extensive documentation available about GPU passthrough for 3D accelerated tasks but they all require in depth configuration, extra displays, and extra input devices. With VirtualGL (https://virtualgl.org) one can take advantage of the existing Qubes OS framework for audio/display by offloading OpenGL onto the secondary graphics card directly with VirtualGL. This document will mo…

[Qubesquark]

Many thanks Vael_S. That seemed to have almost 100% fixed the problem. I would likely never have seen the Window Manager Tweaks feature. Turning the compositor off and back on made a huge difference. Then I increased my video ram once again, which may or may not have had much effect - hard to tell. Full screen video so far is much better, when watching a replay of one of the games, which was suffering from severe lag. Cheers

[Vael_S]

No problem, I noticed this issue ever since multiple distributions went to this stupid composer thing.
XFCE 3 was so much better. Just like Qubes 3. They were faster and more efficient and controllable.

But XFCE went to Composer for some unknown reason.
I would love to have composer turned off and all those stupid windows just be normal again. But they have ll this transparency and more stuff that is just annoying. So it has to be turned on.

Straight from install, that is the first thing I do on any Unix system that uses Composer.
Not to mention turn off the hover to focus feature, turn on the click to focus, turn off the workspace switching while dragging windows and double tapping the screen edge…
And there is more that I turn off as well.

But “composer” is the worst thing to happen to Linux since Microsoft SystemD.

[Vael_S]

I would still recommend moving away from the bad browsers.
If you uninstall Chrome and FireFox-ESR and other browsers from a cloned template, then install vivaldi, you may notice a fair bit of difference.

I don’t have the same issue with Vivaldi. It doesn’t keep sending all this information to their servers, it’s safer and more secure.

FF lags like hell, I have to spend 30 minutes editing the configuration and blocking outgoing IPs and all to stop FireFox from doing bad things all the time, and that’s just no good for a Disposable Guest. Running Vivaldi, I just do the normal setup and away I go. It tell the Vivaldi Servers that it’s an install, for their metrics of how many people in what countries are using their browser, and that’s it. (unless you have account syncronisation turned on)

But other than that it just talks to the websites you visit. and it’s the same with the mobile version as well. So I even run Vivaldi inside my Android guests, even my iOS guests as well. And I don’t have issues running with 1 GB of RAM and 16 MB VRAM.

[Qubesquark]

Many thanks Vael_S for the info. I’ve just installed Vivaldi in my template and set it up in my Personal vm to try out. Bookmarks imported. I might make the complete switch to Vivaldi, if I like it. Cheers