Comment # 101 on bug 1112824 from Timo Jyrinki

FWIW, I can compare with Ubuntu on similar hardware (Kaby Lake R quad core, UHD
620), and even though the kernel parameters mentioned here - or using
balance_performance for energy_performance_preference - make it smoother on TW,
it's still slow compared.

As a subjective measurement in FullHD resolution the super key animation to
Activities should be butter smooth with no hickup or steps in either zoom out
or zoom in with eg 3 windows. Currently the performance for me is about the
same with FullHD on TW with all the kernel tweaks as it is with 4K resolution
on another distro without the kernel tweaks. In my case however the comparison
in case was against a patched GNOME 3.28.3, so it's not apples to apples. Both
testbeds here are using X, not Wayland which seems to perform worse on both.

So even though eg the kernel parameters seem to help to an extent, it does not
seem it could be said "it's kernel", as also indicated by the fact how GNOME on
default Fedora kernel performs just fine too.

At the moment unfortunately I don't have anything more to give, I hope to find
the culprit together though. You may want to set balance_performance instead of
balance_power which was not mentioned here before, but that also is not the
silver bullet in any sense. At one point that was critically needed for
gnome-shell's optimal user experience but I believe that was fixed in 3.30.