Visualisation incredibly slow in WSL2

Hi all,

I have compiled the latest stable version of Geant4 11 from source, on Ubuntu 20.02 under Windows 11 with WSL2. I have the latest NVidia drivers installed for my laptop which has an RTX 3050Ti.

I was following along a YouTube tutorial series to get to know it. It was all working totally great until I created a 100*100 array of sensitive detectors. When opening the visualization, the rendering is so slow it is unusable.

I copied this across to a CentOS7 machine, which is very old, and opened the same project via a VNCviewer window (launched from the same WSL) and this works perfectly fine. This machine has the same version of Genat4 installed from source using the same cmake flags (pasted below). I guess this tells me that there is something bottle-necking when WSL itself is doing the rendering that is bottle-necking.

I was wondering whether anyone had any experience with the visualizer under WSL and if anyone knows whether there is something I can do to make it usable under WSL. In general, I’d prefer to have the option of using the visualizer locally when I need it.

Any and all help and suggestions deeply appreciated. Please let me know if I can provide any further info to help!

Cmake configuration flags:


-DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 -DGEANT4_INSTALL_DATA=ON -DGEANT4_USE_GDML=ON -DGEANT4_USE_QT=ON  -DGEANT4_USE_OPENGL_X11=ON -DGEANT4_USE_RAYTRACER_X11=ON -DGEANT4_BUILD_MULTITHREADED=ON -DGEANT4_BUILD_TLS_MODEL=global-dynamic -DGEANT4_USE_PYTHON=ON -DGEANT4_USE_PYTHON=ON


@xiuzuo11 – I see from your post that you got this working. How did the visualizer perform?

Giving this a bump in the hope of someone can give some suggestions/insights!

It’s the 100*100 pixels array that make the rendering slow. I have no idea to make it fine. :joy:

I take you point, but it’s nothing to do with the geometry. The exact same project works perfectly fine on a tower (running CentOS7) that would have been mid-spec’d about ten years ago.

Since posting, I’ve also gone through the ordeal of installing Geant4 and compiling the project natively on Windows. It runs as smooth as butter.

Ultimately I conclude the issue is with WSLg. There’s obviously some bottle-neck in how it is rendering graphics when there are so many objects on the screen (software, based on resource usage).
Was simply wondering if anyone has any tricks to improve this!

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.