Several people have reported “slow GUI” issues with prebuilt versions of Ardour from ardour.org when used on Linux systems with Nvidia video interfaces.
This problem is caused by a bug in the Nvidia driver. It has been fixed in later versions of the Nvidia driver. There is a workaround for this that will fix the problem for Ardour itself: set the environment variable FORCE_BUGGY_GRADIENTS (to any value) in the context where Ardour will run (precisely how to do this is slightly distribution dependent, so details for those who don’t know how to do this are left for distribution support channels). This environment variable tells Cairo, the drawing library that Ardour uses, not to rely on the video driver’s gradient drawing capabilities (which in the case of these older Nvidia drivers is broken).
set the environment variable FORCE_BUGGY_GRADIENTS (to any value)
Hello.
It’s very easy to find how to set the environment variable, but sorry, i don’t understand exactly what you mean by “any value”? Can you give an exemple maybe? I tried a number, i tried a word, it’s still very slow.
Hello,
I had this problem on my computer and I solved it by installing the following package: compiz (for graphical effects).
I am amaze at the result but it works very well on all the applications…
It’s just a post for people who wants to try to solve this easily.
Edit: made a video to show just about how laggy things really are… resizing tracks with just audio is acceptably smooth, scrolling/zooming with a couple of audio tracks is abit laggy but still bearable. But when you unhide some midi, then things really strive towards being almost unusable…
Definitely an nvidia closed source driver issue in my case.
I experienced the same issue with this driver regardless of the fix posted above. I then switched to the nouveau driver and got it OK again with Paul’s original suggestion.
