Extreme lag with DWMBG??

[aubymori]

2024-04-28.11-28-07.mp4

This doesn't happen without

[aubymori]

I'm done with DWMBG for now. This is just absolutely unusable. I'll come back when you guys actually optimize it. And I know my hardware isn't the issue; real Aero glass from Win7 and Glass8 on Win8/10 both run great.

[SandTechStuff]

I have no performance issues on a laptop running integrated graphics, there must be some other issue, related to DWMBG or not.

Edit: I've had no visible performance issues, I haven't compared dwm's resource usage with and without DWMBG. I am on Windows 11, so the performance should be better than Windows 10 (talked about deeper in discussion), but that doesn't mean it will always be smooth. I may do some testing to see how DWMBG affects dwm's resource usage on Windows 11, just to see for sure.

[kawapure]

Such issues are not observed on @aubymori's setup at all without DWMBG running.

[aubymori]

As well, after reverting to a mostly vanilla Windows 10 and using DWMBG, the issue persists. This is 100% related to DWMBG.

[ArbestRi02]

I don't experience lagging with a Chromium-based browser

[aubymori]

I should mention that I don't play in full fullscreen, I play in borderless fullscreen (which is what Source Unpack defaults to).

[kawapure]

Indeed, I have the same lagging issues if I try playing games in borderless fullscreen after running a game in isolated fullscreen once. That's actually why I have things configured to run in isolated fullscreen right now. I usually play in borderless, but I switched out of confusion as to why borderless fullscreen seemed so obviously choppy (like 15 FPS choppy!) even though the game was reporting FPS well into the hundreds. I believe this is the same issue you had?

[aubymori]

Precisely.

[kawapure]

It's very intriguing that you have the same issue. I have DWMBlurGlass on my other Windows install (some newer Vibranium version), and I definitely don't have the same issues as you. However, you did switch your primary graphics card, right? And had the same issues?

It's an intriguing case, since from my understanding, the problem persists even after you addressed the two biggest concerns:

• Switched primary graphics device so that DWM uses your dedicated GPU instead of integrated
• Updated your DWM version

I have a few more points of curiosity: does the issue persist with that weird DWM version Taniko has? Does the issue persist with DWMBG in perfect isolation (Windhawk completely disabled, no AWM)? And, if you're really willing to, does the issue persist on a completely different Windows install?

[Skyyblaze]

I would also like to have some more insight on this. So far I haven't noticed any performance degradation on my system with DWMBlurGlass but maybe I didn't look close enough yet. That said I use it in conjunction with Mica, not the Aero shader so that might impact things.

[funn-hue]

it doesn't happen for me even with alot of windows open, but i think you should check task manager, i have seen the apps gui sitting in the background eating up my pc for no reason and i had to close it through there

[Alcatel7]

2024-04-28.11-28-07.mp4
This doesn't happen without

Same thing happens to me in laptop. Only need about 5 windows for it to start getting laggy. But glass8 and real windows 7 aero dont lag at all.

And worse is that the windows that are completely obstructed are still rendered ( #243 )

In that issue, Altex said that the optimization in Windows 10's engine is broken but fixed in 11. Maybe, the people who aren't experiencing lag are on Windows 11? However, I do wonder how Glass8 managed to stay well-optimized without any of these issues despite this supposed broken optimization.

Anyways, he said that he is trying to implement this into DWMBlurGlass, let's hope that it becomes a reality

[SandTechStuff]

I didn’t even think of this, I am on Windows 11 and have no lag. It may be a Windows 10 related/exclusive issue.

[kawapure]

@SandTechStuff Indeed. aubymori is using Windows 10 in this post, and that issue states that it's a bug with Windows 10 that is fixed in Windows 11.

@arukateru It's likely that BigMuscle added his own occlusion-culling system into Glass8, because the lack thereof wouldn't go unnoticed on many Windows 10 setups. It's stated that the DWMBG developers are working their own fix, so it's not out of the question that another developer did the same thing before.

Also, the last Glass8 release was for 1909. It's possible that they introduced the occlusion culling issue into the 2004 branch (2004-22H2), and that that was a reason Glass8 stopped development. But this is just speculation on my part.

[funn-hue]

I'm also on a laptop and I never noticed any lag, maybe before the customblur method was introduced, but now it's all fixed for me. Windows 10 BTW

[Maplespe]

There are a lot of system flaws in Windows 10, and it's not the way we want it. We've lost count of the number of times we've had to fix these crappy problems for Microsoft.

Due to the special nature of reverse engineering, it's not as easy as developing a normal application, which requires reverse disassembly to analyze, justify, code, and test. After all, we don't have the Windows source code.

[TheInsane101]

As usual, fuck Microsoft

[Maplespe]

Incidentally, Windows 10's uDWM.dll also has a fair amount of junk code. They serve no real purpose and just sit there, interfering with the view.

[TheInsane101]

Ugh, another Microsoft L

[indigofairyx]

I have and do experience this randomly. Generally have to uninstall \reimstall dwmblirglass and\or logout or reboot.

It effects everything even moving the mouse across the screen. And I've as it happening my GPU usage skyrockets to 35 - 45 % from dwm.exe.

[Alcatel7]

I know performance kinda sucks rn but cmon guys show a bit more love to the developers. They said they were working on it and even so, they are doing more than anyone thought was possible. He has made more progress than anyone else has in the many years before. He has already made it possible for the Windows 10 to look exactly like 7 more than any other point in time. It is truly amazing what they have accomplished

[indigofairyx]

@arukateru i agree, im not really complaining [as difficult as the bugs can be]. i am more than ELATED!!! and Thrilled to have aero back on win10!!! 😄 😄 ❤️ [excluding uwp and browsers, i didnt want to mess with uwp hacks]. such a small cosmetic change has made all the difference.

i will add i only started using win10 less then two years ago, still have a win7 dual boot. ive been trying to get an "aero10" theme to work on my system for two years, stardock was is an even buggier pain in the butt. and i couldn't get other options to work.

i LOVE BWMBlurGlass! please keep the awesome work yall!!!

i even went as far as to create my own, custom aeropeek.png for the title bar accents so they'd be even more exaggerated aero effect! haha

cheers
x

[Alcatel7]

Nice, looks very pretty

[ArbestRi02]

@arukateru i agree, im not really complaining [as difficult as the bugs can be]. i am more than ELATED!!! and Thrilled to have aero back on win10!!! 😄 😄 ❤️ [excluding uwp and browsers, i didnt want to mess with uwp hacks]. such a small cosmetic change has made all the difference.

i will add i only started using win10 less then two years ago, still have a win7 dual boot. ive been trying to get an "aero10" theme to work on my system for two years, stardock was is an even buggier pain in the butt. and i couldn't get other options to work.

i LOVE BWMBlurGlass! please keep the awesome work yall!!!

i even went as far as to create my own, custom aeropeek.png for the title bar accents so they'd be even more exaggerated aero effect! haha

cheers x

Were you once trying to use WindowBlinds

[indigofairyx]

Yes. Windowblinds was even more buggy and more of resource hog with a lot of graphical errors. It's install foot print was massive compared to blurglass.

I don't recommend windowblinds. My system is high-mid, i7 7thgen with 64g rams. And windowblinds was always glitching out.

My only issue with blurglass has been the extreme GPU usage. If they fix the memory leak this is damn near perfect!

[funn-hue]

Windowblinds has many flaws. first one is the goddamn glitches, second is the way the themes were so inaccurate yet people said they were 1:1 copies, third is the goddamn resource usage, my games went from 100+ fps to max 40 with windowblinds. We should be happy we no longer have to use windowblinds

[kfh83]

I know performance kinda sucks rn but cmon guys show a bit more love to the developers. They said they were working on it and even so, they are doing more than anyone thought was possible. He has made more progress than anyone else has in the many years before. He has already made it possible for the Windows 10 to look exactly like 7 more than any other point in time. It is truly amazing what they have accomplished

@arukateru i agree, im not really complaining [as difficult as the bugs can be]. i am more than ELATED!!! and Thrilled to have aero back on win10!!! 😄 😄 ❤️ [excluding uwp and browsers, i didnt want to mess with uwp hacks]. such a small cosmetic change has made all the difference.

i will add i only started using win10 less then two years ago, still have a win7 dual boot. ive been trying to get an "aero10" theme to work on my system for two years, stardock was is an even buggier pain in the butt. and i couldn't get other options to work.

i LOVE BWMBlurGlass! please keep the awesome work yall!!!

i even went as far as to create my own, custom aeropeek.png for the title bar accents so they'd be even more exaggerated aero effect! haha

cheers x

Honestly as much as i like the project it needs more fixing issues than compliments right now, evident by the amount of stability and performance issues a lot of people using it are getting. I myself, can notice the lag mentioned in this discussion in some instances (albeit a lot less, since this seems to be amplified by the usage of an iGPU) and i won't even get into the amount of DWM crashes caused by DWMBlurGlass, it truly shouldn't be present given Windows 7 itself or Glass8 didn't have this many performance and stability issues.

Of course, i can't complain that much since i can barely program anything and especially don't know how the deeper parts of the DWMBlurGlass even work, but this is still a call for a stability release, especially given how many new features we've been getting.

[Maplespe]

On a side note, some mods have really badly written code.
Even though we try to avoid conflicts as much as possible in DWMBlurGlass, there are some things that really shouldn't be on our shoulders.

[Maplespe]

I would also like to say that this issue was introduced by a newer version of win10 after 2004.

Do you know which version?

This has been a problem since the first version of 2004.
The specific reason is that the CArrayBasedCoverageSet::AddAntiOccluderRect function causes some error problems.

[Maplespe]

The problem is basically investigated, so we should be releasing a version with fixes for occlusion culling optimizations soon.

But we don't have a physical Windows 10 machine to test.
Even without optimization, DWMBlurGlass had little performance issues in the VM, even with 10+ windows open.

[aubymori]

I'd be more than happy to test it for you, since I have a bare metal Windows 10 install with performance issues relating to this.

[Maplespe]

Thanks I know, I'll post it here when it's done.

[Maplespe]

You can try this version first, there is an "Enable Window Occlusion Culling" option in the GUI.

It has some known issues:
When the occluded window is behind another transparent window section, if you click and drag it to the upper level, the window blurring content behind it will not update until you release the mouse or activate the window.

DWMBlurGlass_2.2.0_test_02.zip

[kfh83]

Also, I found that AeroBackdrop uses 2 layers of Gaussian blur. Gaussian blur is a GPU-intensive operation, which causes AeroBackdrop to take up twice as much GPU per window as other effects. This would also be a very big efficiency improvement if it could use only one layer.

Sadly this is something i introduced as part of my Aero shader update. Ideally, we should be able to just reuse one gaussian blur layer across both the Afterglow layer and the Blur layer, but i found direct2d/dcomp/whatever just doesn't let me do that, it renders a clear backdrop entirely (breaks). If you wish, you can return to the 2.1.1 shader for performance reasons which is a fairly big step back in accuracy but otherwise only uses one gaussian blur backdrop. Sadly, due to how the Windows 7 colorization works it's impossible to get it down to only one layer, given many things need to be blended for the effect to work, and this was one of the major issues in version 2.0.1 where the Aero shader only used a single normal blend layer on top of the blur.

I made an image that explains the 2 layers that should reuse gaussian blur, the third layer is ignored as it's a simple color-over-balance:

[ALTaleX531]

I just removed the need to use gaussian blur twice in the test branch and it still looks accurate.

[Alcatel7]

Just tried compiling it, looks fine in active in my opinion, but for some reason inactive color balance gets thrown off.

[kfh83]

new shader

old shader

windows 7

@ALTaleX531 Something you did seems to have significantly affected inactive windows.

Ok, i figured it has to do with the Afterglow layer + Blur:

old shader, afterglow and blur maxed

new shader, same thing

You can notice on the new shader there is no subtle "tinting" that the old shader has, because it seems like afterglow kinda loses its purpose once its mixed with the blur layer.

[kfh83]

And indeed, it seems the new test version drops GPU usage a fair bit too, but you might need to revise the aero shader to get it to look like how it did before.

[TheInsane101]

It's worth noting that Windows 7 scaled the image down before the shader was applied, it's particularly noticeable on this image:

And on this streak in particular:

Oh, so THAT's why Windows Vista and 7's Aero looks as if it uses box/pixelated blur instead of Gaussian blur?

[kfh83]

Yes. Box blur actually looks different to just downscaling/rescaling + gaussian blur.

[TheInsane101]

It would be nice to have this added to Aero to make it look even more realistic; I always liked this look.

[TheInsane101]

Sadly, due to how the Windows 7 colorization works it's impossible to get it down to only one layer, given many things need to be blended for the effect to work, and this was one of the major issues in version 2.0.1 where the Aero shader only used a single normal blend layer on top of the blur.

So Windows Vista's blur is actually better optimised than 7's because it doesn't have the extra effects?

[kfh83]

In the end the performance hit between vista and 7's effects shouldn't be as apparent as in DWMBlurGlass since Microsoft has the source code to DWM, did the shaders in DirectX 3D, and probably could do some crazy math for optimization (aswell as ~2 years of time and a team full of developers) to really make Vista's DWM (and 7's) work as well as it did on hardware from nearly 20 years ago. But i guess you can say Vista's blur is better optimized? I think the speed difference you would notice comes down from the actual os more so than the blur effect.

[kfh83]

Okay, so i think i hit a major breakthrough for anyone having performance issues on DWMBlurGlass. The following video is on my Core 2 Duo machine (a really extreme case scenario, don't worry), but the effects can be noticed on a better machine (my main computer drops it's peak GPU usage when moving a window from ~60% to ~30% at blur radius 3). Both videos show the effect of the global blur option at the most extreme setting vs just using the titlebar blur:

IMG_6545.MOV

IMG_6547.1.mov

(same, but with GPU usage on my main computer)

TLDR, TLDW; global blur radius has a fairly significant impact on GPU usage and performance.

[Maplespe]

Okay, so i think i hit a major breakthrough for anyone having performance issues on DWMBlurGlass. The following video is on my Core 2 Duo machine (a really extreme case scenario, don't worry), but the effects can be noticed on a better machine (my main computer drops it's peak GPU usage when moving a window from ~60% to ~30% at blur radius 3). Both videos show the effect of the global blur option at the most extreme setting vs just using the titlebar blur:

IMG_6545.MOV
IMG_6547.1.mov
(same, but with GPU usage on my main computer)

TLDR, TLDW; global blur radius has a fairly significant impact on GPU usage and performance.

I may have mentioned before that modifying the global blur radius breaks this optimization.
But the reason for this is that, due to the peculiarities of how Gaussian blur is calculated, the higher the blur radius the more rounds are calculated, whereas with higher blurs the system automatically pre-scales the image and then uses a lower number of blur rounds to reduce the number of calculations.

In addition, this scaling optimization itself exists in HostBackdrop (e.g. Notification Center, Taskbar, Acrylic layer of System Settings).
Modifying the Acrylic blur (using the Acrylic Blur Radius Adjuster mod or modifying the global blur) will break this optimization.

Modifying the global blur radius will break the pre-scaling. But I think this is only noticeable at high blur radius.

Pre-scaling should reduce the number of calculations by half as it scales to 50% of the original.

For the usual win7 blur (2-3) It may not have a significant effect.

But theoretically, it could cut the calculation in half without modifying it, and another half if only one layer of Gaussian blur is used.

[Maplespe]

This is a possible direction for optimization.

If you know how to modify code, you can try to modify BlurRadiusTweaker.cpp
I wrote in the comments in there the reason for returning 1. You can modify it to 2.5 or higher (2.5 is the default)
This represents the matrix scaling multiplier, but if you don't set it to 1 you won't be able to use the low blur radius properly (under 20)

float CCustomBlur_DetermineOutputScale(float a1, float a2, D2D1_GAUSSIANBLUR_OPTIMIZATION a3)
	{
		//hostBackdrop brush will be pre-scaled to 2.5x using the matrix, then scaled back using the D2D Scale effect in BuildEffect, and then blurred with 2 custom Gaussian kernels to achieve a fast and high blur calculation.
		// Set this to 1 for no scaling, otherwise the image in BuildEffect will be very blurry and mosaic-like.
		return 1.f; }
	}

But again, this one only applies to Windows 10.
Windows 11 uses the new unified CRenderingTechnique_ExecuteBlur function, which is much faster than win10's and doesn't require modifying the scaling matrix multiplier.

[kfh83]

^ Just a note, you can set the value below 1 (i.e 0.5, 0.25, etc) and it'll LOWER the quality of the blur, however it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on performance.

[Alcatel7]

I set it to 0.01 and it does seem to have quite the effect on performance, about 20 windows before the lag gets too bad compared to the normal 8

[Alcatel7]

Does anyone have a 2.2.0 WITH occlusion culling but WITHOUT button glow? Button glow is amazing but it crashes a lot and button position is off sometimes idk why

[wiktorwiktor12]

i do have a 2.2.0 build with support for button glow without using the default dwmblurglass button resizing (so that i can use it with the windhawk mod because of the titlebar text), but it is toggleable since i haven't removed checks for the config setting for old button height

[wiktorwiktor12]

tho u should be able to just turn off old button height in config and use the windhawk mod

[kfh83]

yeah, just disable the old button height option and keep the culling option on

[TorutheRedFox]

yeah, just disable the old button height option and keep the culling option on

it'd be cool to have the glow but with custom button sizing (as I use a Vista theme and overall prefer the smaller caption buttons)