On Thursday 28 August 2008 21:03:28 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Donnerstag, 28. August 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > On Thursday 28 August 2008 17:56:37 Andrew Gaydenko wrote: > > > Ben, sorry, my question is OT wrt your message. > > > > > > Are there indeed good things (I don't mean ruches and flowers) in KDE4 > > > to worry about them at all? Reading all those KDE4 reviews I really can > > > not understand why KDE4 may be more useful for me rather KDE3. > > > > Don't even bother trying KDE4 if you have a recent nVidia card. > > Performance is atrocious as KDE4 uses acceleration effects in plasma etc > > that nVidia didn't account for in their driver, with the results that > > significant amounts of rendering are done using a software path (i.e. not > > in hardware), which is very slow. > > > > There also doesn't appear to be any quick fix coming anytime soon. > > well, it was mostly fixed with their latest beta drivers.
You mean 177.68 right? It's far from fixed here. Admittedly better than 173.*, but the vast majority of work remains to be done: translucent menu paints very slow, 3 seconds+ and jerky. Window resize slow, the content cannot keep up with a mere resize, a full repaint takes about three seconds. Window move is not perfect, but acceptable. The move motion is noticeably jerky, but the rendering of content and repainting of unobscured content below is fine. This tells me that the actual problem, as defined by AaronP on nvnews.net[1] is not being fixed in these releases, just worked around. TwinView JustWorks(tm) - what a relief! I had images of yet another massive debugging and config session when my boss proudly presented me with a brand new 17" LCD. Apparently all the sysadmins get them, just because we can :-) I'm noticing stability problems since using 177.67 - The GUI suddenly freezes solid, gkrellm stops updating, no keyboard input but mouse motion does still work. If I change to a virtual console and back to X, I get a black screen and white pointer. Luckily, I can usually log in on a virtual console and SIGHUP the window manager, this often fixes it. The only changes recently have been to e17 and the nvidia driver. I'd be tempted to say my e17 from CVS is buggy, but I get the exact same problem running KDE4, leaving the driver as the only common change. alan [1] Essentially, that most drivers when compositing are optimized for window resize in their use of video memory. nVidia instead built their stuff to optimize the common case - window refresh and move. This has the side effect of resizes falling back to a default (and excruciatingly slow) software code path. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
