Hi I have a rpi 4 4gb connected to the same screen/keyboard/mouse as my regular desktop pc meaning I can switch between the two with a single press of a button on the screen.
And no matter what I do the rpi desktop just feels sluggish and non responsive vs my normal pc (ryzen 5600x, 32gb ram, radeon 6600 and 1tb samsung 980 pro nvme as the os drive + various older ssds/hdds as storage drives with win 11 as the os but it's the same if I boot linux from a usb drive, so it's not like it's some super fast desktop or anything).
First the mouse movements and scrolling in ff (or chrome or anything else), just feels much slower and more jerky than the desktop. I assume that's because it's a 1440p 170Hz display and the rpi runs it at only 60Hz vs the pc's 170Hz. I've checked the mouse polling rate and it's the same as on the desktop (1000Hz), so that shouldn't be an issue. I've also tried installing kde/plasma on it and it actually let's me set the screen refresh to 120Hz which does make things less jerky at some moments but most of the time it feels even slower because I don't think the rpi 4 is actually fast enough to run kde/plasma fast enough (I've turned off all the bling effects and it didn't make much difference).
Second even after launching Firefox switching between tabs just feels much slower than on the pc. I get that with only 4gb ram I'll never be able to have 1000+ tabs open like on the pc (yes, I'm one of those people, my record is 3000+ open tabs afaik), but even with like 4 tabs without any extremely cpu demanding webpages open, switching between them is slower than is switching between hundreds of tabs on the pc. And 4 tabs should be able to fit in the memory.
Then there's multimedia playback either local files with mpv or on yt which is just slow with many dropped frames even if the source video is 1080p h264 without using any fancy upscaling/downscaling/image enhancement filters/settings while the pc can play 1080p and 4k av1 with zero problems even with some more fancy upscaling/downscaling/image enhancement filters/settings. And even at 60fps. Vlc is a bit faster but still not completely smooth and the ui is just ugly.
Then there's trying to run more than one even slightly demanding application at once. On the pc this causes basically no noticeable slowdown (firefox with many tabs, a video player playing 4k av1, handbrake transcoding, qbittorrent dowoading 10+ torrentes,... feels as fast as doing just one of these things) but the rpi will become very slow just having Firefox open and 1 torrent downloading at max speed (I have 350/100 mbps fth and both the rpi and the pc are connected via 1gbps ethernet). I assume this is because the sd card is too slow to write incoming data fast enough? I did try the official sd card speed test and it said the card was fast enough, but I guess it's not really.
I'm running the latest 64bit version of raspberry pi os on the rpi, using zram for swap and logs, have tried overclocking it a bit (but unfortunately get voltage too low warnings quickly if I'm doing that despite using the power supply that came with it). And none of it really makes much difference.
However console apps via ssh run well enough for it to not seem slow.
So, my questions would be:
- is it possible to run 1440p at a higher refresh rate than 60Hz unofficially without resorting to using kde/plasma (since that feels even slower than the default desktop at 60Hz? Since it can supposedly do 4k60 (around 14.5gbps bw) it should be able to do 1440p144 (around 13.5gbps bw) and because it supports hdmi 2.0 (~14.5gbps bw) hardware wise, shouldn't it? Especially considering it can do 1440p120 in kde/plasma (1440p/144 doesn't work tho despite the fact there should be enough bandwidth for it to work)
- can switching between tabs on ff be made faster (as in instant as on the pc) assuming there's not too many of them and they don't contain anything too cpu intensive?
- can media playback at 1080p h264 (and perhaps h265) actually be made smooth using mpv or some other player, if so any suggestions regarding settings/player (also for some reason mpv isn't able to use hardware decoding either crashing, not showing a picture or being even slower than sw decoding)? What about yt playback at 1080p?
- can having more than one cpu demanding app running at once be made faster and if so how? I assume that a faster sd card would solve the slowness caused by qbittorrent?
- is there any hope of running some prettier de than the default at a reasonable speed (something like kde/plasma 6 with at least some of the bling would be amazing but somehow I doubt it's possible). Kde/plasma 5 does run, but not at reasonable speed and not with any of the bling turned on.
Like I get it'll never be insanely fast, but at least acceptablly fast should be possible?
All of this would also probably not be as apparent if I couldn't switch between it and my desktop pc with a single button, but I can and it just makes it feel very sluggish.
And no matter what I do the rpi desktop just feels sluggish and non responsive vs my normal pc (ryzen 5600x, 32gb ram, radeon 6600 and 1tb samsung 980 pro nvme as the os drive + various older ssds/hdds as storage drives with win 11 as the os but it's the same if I boot linux from a usb drive, so it's not like it's some super fast desktop or anything).
First the mouse movements and scrolling in ff (or chrome or anything else), just feels much slower and more jerky than the desktop. I assume that's because it's a 1440p 170Hz display and the rpi runs it at only 60Hz vs the pc's 170Hz. I've checked the mouse polling rate and it's the same as on the desktop (1000Hz), so that shouldn't be an issue. I've also tried installing kde/plasma on it and it actually let's me set the screen refresh to 120Hz which does make things less jerky at some moments but most of the time it feels even slower because I don't think the rpi 4 is actually fast enough to run kde/plasma fast enough (I've turned off all the bling effects and it didn't make much difference).
Second even after launching Firefox switching between tabs just feels much slower than on the pc. I get that with only 4gb ram I'll never be able to have 1000+ tabs open like on the pc (yes, I'm one of those people, my record is 3000+ open tabs afaik), but even with like 4 tabs without any extremely cpu demanding webpages open, switching between them is slower than is switching between hundreds of tabs on the pc. And 4 tabs should be able to fit in the memory.
Then there's multimedia playback either local files with mpv or on yt which is just slow with many dropped frames even if the source video is 1080p h264 without using any fancy upscaling/downscaling/image enhancement filters/settings while the pc can play 1080p and 4k av1 with zero problems even with some more fancy upscaling/downscaling/image enhancement filters/settings. And even at 60fps. Vlc is a bit faster but still not completely smooth and the ui is just ugly.
Then there's trying to run more than one even slightly demanding application at once. On the pc this causes basically no noticeable slowdown (firefox with many tabs, a video player playing 4k av1, handbrake transcoding, qbittorrent dowoading 10+ torrentes,... feels as fast as doing just one of these things) but the rpi will become very slow just having Firefox open and 1 torrent downloading at max speed (I have 350/100 mbps fth and both the rpi and the pc are connected via 1gbps ethernet). I assume this is because the sd card is too slow to write incoming data fast enough? I did try the official sd card speed test and it said the card was fast enough, but I guess it's not really.
I'm running the latest 64bit version of raspberry pi os on the rpi, using zram for swap and logs, have tried overclocking it a bit (but unfortunately get voltage too low warnings quickly if I'm doing that despite using the power supply that came with it). And none of it really makes much difference.
However console apps via ssh run well enough for it to not seem slow.
So, my questions would be:
- is it possible to run 1440p at a higher refresh rate than 60Hz unofficially without resorting to using kde/plasma (since that feels even slower than the default desktop at 60Hz? Since it can supposedly do 4k60 (around 14.5gbps bw) it should be able to do 1440p144 (around 13.5gbps bw) and because it supports hdmi 2.0 (~14.5gbps bw) hardware wise, shouldn't it? Especially considering it can do 1440p120 in kde/plasma (1440p/144 doesn't work tho despite the fact there should be enough bandwidth for it to work)
- can switching between tabs on ff be made faster (as in instant as on the pc) assuming there's not too many of them and they don't contain anything too cpu intensive?
- can media playback at 1080p h264 (and perhaps h265) actually be made smooth using mpv or some other player, if so any suggestions regarding settings/player (also for some reason mpv isn't able to use hardware decoding either crashing, not showing a picture or being even slower than sw decoding)? What about yt playback at 1080p?
- can having more than one cpu demanding app running at once be made faster and if so how? I assume that a faster sd card would solve the slowness caused by qbittorrent?
- is there any hope of running some prettier de than the default at a reasonable speed (something like kde/plasma 6 with at least some of the bling would be amazing but somehow I doubt it's possible). Kde/plasma 5 does run, but not at reasonable speed and not with any of the bling turned on.
Like I get it'll never be insanely fast, but at least acceptablly fast should be possible?
All of this would also probably not be as apparent if I couldn't switch between it and my desktop pc with a single button, but I can and it just makes it feel very sluggish.
Statistics: Posted by sunhalocat — Sun Jul 14, 2024 12:03 pm