Golly 5.0 on Ubuntu 24.04 — zoom lags while running

[LCH_2011]

Hi everyone,

(This post was translated with the help of Claude (AI), English isn't my first language.)
I'm new to Golly, so apologies if this is already a known issue.

Setup:
Ubuntu 24.04.4, kernel 7.0 (HWE), GNOME/Wayland
Ryzen 7 7700, RTX 5070, driver 595.84-open
Golly 5.0

Issue:
At default or higher step speed, zooming on large patterns causes noticeable stutter. Pausing the simulation removes the lag completely. On Windows, the exact same RLE file at the same speed runs smoothly with no zoom lag at all.

Questions:
Is this a known Linux (wxGTK3/Cairo) rendering issue when zooming during active simulation?
Any settings or workarounds that help?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[rabbit]

I have also been having this issue with a(n) Ubuntu-derived distro (Linux Mint 22.3) and an AMD graphics card (Radeon RX 6600 XT).

[Andrew]

At default or higher step speed, zooming on large patterns causes noticeable stutter.

I'm assuming this only happens when using your mouse wheel to zoom in/out (and not when using the keyboard shortcuts [ and ], or the +/- cursors)? I don't really know why this would cause problems on your system. The only thing I can think of is to open Preferences > View and change the wheel sensitivity setting. Try the minimum value (1) or maximum value (10) and see if it makes any difference.

[LCH_2011]

At default or higher step speed, zooming on large patterns causes noticeable stutter.

I'm assuming this only happens when using your mouse wheel to zoom in/out (and not when using the keyboard shortcuts [ and ], or the +/- cursors)? I don't really know why this would cause problems on your system. The only thing I can think of is to open Preferences > View and change the wheel sensitivity setting. Try the minimum value (1) or maximum value (10) and see if it makes any difference.

Wow, it's actually one of the authors of this software!

Even before you offered your suggestion, I had already found a workaround — running the Windows version of Golly via Wine, which did resolve the stuttering issue. But thank you so much for your reply regardless!

[rabbit]

I'm assuming this only happens when using your mouse wheel to zoom in/out (and not when using the keyboard shortcuts [ and ], or the +/- cursors)? I don't really know why this would cause problems on your system. The only thing I can think of is to open Preferences > View and change the wheel sensitivity setting. Try the minimum value (1) or maximum value (10) and see if it makes any difference.

Sorry for the late reply, but unfortunately changing that setting didn't fix the problem. It also does indeed happen with the keyboard shortcuts you mentioned, as well as the numbered keyboard shortcuts like pressing 1 for 1:1.

[Andrew]

Sorry for the late reply, but unfortunately changing that setting didn't fix the problem. It also does indeed happen with the keyboard shortcuts you mentioned, as well as the numbered keyboard shortcuts like pressing 1 for 1:1.

Can you describe the "stutter" in more detail? Does it happen when using all algorithms? Any other clues might be useful.

Are you able to build Golly from source? If so, it might help to build it using the latest code from sourceforge. We now use GTK-3 (see docs/Build.html) so maybe the stutter is due to GTK-2 problems.

[rabbit]

Can you describe the "stutter" in more detail? Does it happen when using all algorithms? Any other clues might be useful.

Are you able to build Golly from source? If so, it might help to build it using the latest code from sourceforge. We now use GTK-3 (see docs/Build.html) so maybe the stutter is due to GTK-2 problems.

The program competely freezes up for a short period of time every time the zoom level is changed while a processing-heavy pattern is being actively simulated, although it appears to still process the pattern while it's frozen since it skips a few frames of the simulation. It does not happen when the pattern is paused, and affects all algorithms.

[rabbit]

Unfortunately, it appears that the issue is even worse after building 5.1b1 from source with the default local-gtk.mk configuration. Zooming into a large pattern while it was running actually ended up freezing the entire program indefinitely, until I killed it.

[NNlk05]

I don't see this on my Xubuntu laptop, NVIDIA GPU.

[Andrew]

Unfortunately, it appears that the issue is even worse after building 5.1b1 from source with the default local-gtk.mk configuration. Zooming into a large pattern while it was running actually ended up freezing the entire program indefinitely, until I killed it.

Which version of wxGTK did you build Golly with? The latest stable release from wxwidgets.org is 3.2.11, so if you used something older then it might be worth downloading that version and building again. If that doesn't work I've pretty much run out of ideas.