Johan Vromans

Site Menu

Serious regression in graphics performance

A serious regression in graphics performance makes good-working presentations no longer acceptable. Presentations that looked nice and flashy in OpenOffice.org 2.2 look crippled in 2.3.1. I cannot show them to customers anymore.

To illustrate what I mean, I've created a sample presentation. It is part of a presentation I've shown to customers several times on my notebook, and Acer Travelmate 40001WLMi. It has 1280Mb of RAM, an ATI Mobile Radeon 9700 graphics card, and a 1.5GHz Centrino processor. It's running GNU/Linux (Fedora 8). OpenOffice.org versions involved are 2.2, official dutch build, and 2.3.1, official Sun build.

I've created some movies to show what happens.

Slide 1
This is the first slide, with OpenOffice.org 2.2. Note the smooth movements of the objects.

The same slide with OpenOffice 2.3.1. Note the staggering movements. The Customer object doesn't even gets to it's final postion, and the arrow appears in front of it, instead of behind it.
Slide 2
This is the second slide, with OpenOffice.org 2.2. Note the smooth movements of the objects. All onions pass in front of the boxes.

The same slide with OpenOffice 2.3.1. Note the staggering movements. Some onions pass behind the boxes, instead of front of them.

This is fully reproducible at any time, so it is not dependent on system activity and so on.

I've filed this as issue 85029.

Shortly thereafter, I was pointed to issue 75315. The 'trick' described there did, indeed, fix the problem. Nice to have such undocumented, hidden settings .

Edit: November 2008 With Openoffice.org version 3.0 the graphics performance has degraded further. With 3.0, the results after applying the 'fix' are as bad as with 2.4 without the 'fix'. It is a pity to notice that graphical effects, mandatory for juicy presentations, are almost neglected bij the OOo team.