Skip to content

Choppy GNOME animations when using "balanced power" mode on Intel platform

  • Fedora 34
  • power-profiles-daemon 0.8

After installing power-profiles-daemon and running it in the default mode (balanced-power), my GNOME animations (especially opening/closing the overview) start to stutter quite significantly. Also, the overall system responsiveness seems reduced compared to not having power-profiles-daemon installed at all. It feels like the CPU isn't properly ramping up anymore.

My former understanding was that not having power-profiles-daemon installed and having it installed and running in "balanced-power" mode should behave the same. However, for me, that does not seem to be the case. FWIW, animations are fluid again when I choose the "performance" profile.

This especially concerns me because Fedora recently started to install power-profiles-daemon and people will start to complain about GNOME's animation not performing well...

FWIW, here some hardware info that might help

System:    Host: xps-9370 Kernel: 5.11.11-300.fc34.x86_64 x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc 
           v: 2.35.1-41.fc34 Desktop: GNOME 40.0 Distro: Fedora release 34 (Thirty Four) 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: Dell product: XPS 13 9370 v: N/A serial: <superuser required> 
           Mobo: Dell model: 0W970W v: A05 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Dell v: 1.14.3 
           date: 03/17/2021 
Battery:   ID-1: BAT0 charge: 22.0 Wh (63.2%) condition: 34.8/52.0 Wh (67.0%) volts: 8.0 
           min: 7.6 model: LGC-LGC6.73 DELL H754V91 status: Discharging 
CPU:       Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i7-8550U bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Kaby Lake 
           note: check rev: A cache: L2: 8 MiB 
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 31999 
           Speed: 811 MHz min/max: 400/4000 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 811 2: 800 3: 895 4: 900 
           5: 836 6: 900 7: 856 8: 857 
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 620 vendor: Dell driver: i915 v: kernel bus-ID: 00:02.0 
           Device-2: Realtek Integrated_Webcam_HD type: USB driver: uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-5:2 
           Display: wayland server: X.Org 1.21.1 compositor: gnome-shell driver: 
           loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.0.1 
           direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1f.3 
           Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.11.11-300.fc34.x86_64 running: yes 
           Sound Server-2: JACK v: 1.9.16 running: no 
           Sound Server-3: PulseAudio v: 14.2-rebootstrapped running: no 
           Sound Server-4: PipeWire v: 0.3.24 running: yes 
Network:   Device-1: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter 
           vendor: Rivet Networks Killer 1435 Wireless-AC driver: ath10k_pci v: kernel 
           port: f040 bus-ID: 02:00.0 
           IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: 9c:b6:d0:93:91:1d 
Bluetooth: Device-1: Foxconn / Hon Hai type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 bus-ID: 1-7:3 
           Report: This feature requires one of these tools: hciconfig/bt-adapter 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 349.77 GiB (73.3%) 
           ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: PM981 NVMe 512GB size: 476.94 GiB 
           temp: 28.9 C 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 475.35 GiB used: 349.17 GiB (73.5%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 
           ID-2: /boot size: 975.9 MiB used: 564 MiB (57.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 
           ID-3: /boot/efi size: 598.8 MiB used: 49.5 MiB (8.3%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
           ID-4: /home size: 475.35 GiB used: 349.17 GiB (73.5%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 
Swap:      ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 34.0 C mobo: 28.0 C sodimm: SODIMM C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 0 
Info:      Processes: 359 Uptime: 4h 12m Memory: 15.33 GiB used: 6.27 GiB (40.9%) Init: systemd 
           runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.0.1 clang: 12.0.0 Packages: 6662 Shell: Zsh v: 5.8 
           inxi: 3.3.02
Edited by Björn Daase