Performance Tuning

Performance Tuning

Live wallpapers can be expensive. Some knobs to turn down if your fans spool up or laptop battery drains too fast.

FPS cap

Lower the FPS cap in the plugin's settings. 30 fps is plenty for almost every Scene wallpaper; the default may be 60.

Pause when occluded

Toggle Pause when window is maximised / fullscreen if available — there's no reason to render frames you can't see.

Mute audio

If you don't care about wallpaper sound, mute it; this skips the decode pipeline (and on Scene wallpapers, FFT spectrum analysis).

Prefer Scene over Video

Where the same wallpaper is available in both formats, Scene rendering is GPU-native via Vulkan and usually cheaper than software-decoded video.

Use MPV for video

If you have hardware decoding (vainfo / vdpauinfo should report a working driver), MPV will offload video decode to the GPU.

Resolution

Avoid 4K wallpapers on iGPUs. Pick 1080p variants if the author published them.

Disable expensive effects

Some Scene wallpapers use heavy effects — Local Contrast, God Rays, Light Shafts, Reflection, PBR lighting. If a specific wallpaper is slow, check its Properties panel — many authors expose a "Quality" or "Effects" dropdown you can knock down a step. See Scene Renderer → User Properties.

Disable system-audio reactivity

If a wallpaper reacts to system audio (FFT spectrum), the capture path runs even when you're not playing music. Some wallpapers expose a toggle in their Properties; otherwise muting the plugin doesn't disable spectrum analysis on its own.

Check Vulkan driver

Some performance bugs aren't the plugin — they're the GPU driver. AMD users on AMDVLK often see better results on RADV. NVIDIA users should be on the latest proprietary driver.