Plexamp >= 4.50.0 performance issues

First of all, I want to say that I love the new look of Plexamp on desktop! It looks much more modern and it’s more intuitive to navigate. There are still some rough edges, but it’s a big step forward in my opinion.

I am experiencing one issue with it though - performance. Compared to the previous version I was using (4.13.2), the current version (I’ve tried 4.50.20 and 4.50.21-beta2) is very sluggish. The animations are lagging, there is a noticeable input lag and even the MPRIS events are oftentimes delayed by around one second.

Is this a known limitation now, or is something wrong on my end? I’m on Linux and I use the AppImage binaries.

It’s possibly related to your GPU, Linux distribution, windowing system, Linux on the desktop is rather fraught with peril. You can try the Flatpak and see if that helps, and/or play with all the GPU flags available.

Thanks for the prompt response, @elan!
I have now tried also the Flatpak version and it seems the same regarding performance.

I’m on the Arch Linux distribution with Hyprland and using NVIDIA 4070 Ti GPU.
Just to be clear, I am not expecting the Plexamp team to investigate this issue on this setup, I am just putting it here for completeness and perhaps someone has a similar setup and knows the solution to this problem.

But you’ve mentioned GPU flags - where would I find those? I tried running the AppImage with -h / --help and got nothing. I also went through the settings in Plexamp, but couldn’t find anything regarding GPU flags.

They’re environment variables for WebKitGTK, not command-line flags. On NVIDIA, Plexamp turns off WebKit’s DMA-BUF renderer by default because it used to leave the window blank, and the fallback pushes every frame through the CPU, which is very likely your lag. Try WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=0 ./Plexamp.AppImage (or flatpak run --env=WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=0 com.plexamp.Plexamp), and if the window comes up blank, GDK_BACKEND=x11 instead; let me know which one works.