With an increased number of games running on linux I think it would be really good if there was an option under 'Window Manager Tweaks' to automatically disable compositing for full-screen apps to improve performance and compatibility with games. Currently Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source and other games running on the Source engine will not start in XFCE unless compositing is manually disabled.
Compositing is enabled here, and Source games runs fine.
Hmm that's interesting, maybe it's dependent on graphics card and driver version? I've got Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with fglrx-updates 2:9.012-0ubuntu1 from the Ubuntu repositories on 13.04. What setup do you have? Can you think of anything else?
Created attachment 5019 compositing setup Attached file is a screenshot of my compositing setup. I'm using Xfce 4.10 (xfwm4 4.10.0-r1) on Gentoo amd64 multilib, with a GeForce GTX 560 and nvidia drivers 313.30.
Override redirect windows are automatically un-redirected when fullscreen. This cannot be done for regular windows, but most game use override redirect windows when full screen anyway.
And "display fullscreen overlay windows directly" is enabled in your setup.
Fullscreen unredirection is not working properly in SDL 2.0, so composite effects are not suspended even in fullscreen. This is visible because there's tearing even with vsync. I have tested this behavior on Team Fortress, Serious Sam 3, Portal, Left4Dead 2 an other SDL 2.0 games. This is something you should look into.
I'd like to throw my vote in for this feature. I just installed xubuntu 13.04, Steam and Don't Starve on my new desktop but there was serious screen tearing. I disabled compisitor with the below command as per a forum, but to make XFCE "do the right thing", it should disable compositing whenever a fullscreen application is launched using OpenGL. xfconf-query --channel=xfwm4 --property=/general/use_compositing --type=bool --toggle
SDL 2.0 no longer use override redirect windows for fullscreen but now uses regular windows instead and xfwm4 cannot "un-redirect" regular windows because that would break all apps in fullscreen, sorry can't fix. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 9314 ***