Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Upgrading from FX-5200 to a GeForce 6200 512MB

[Paul Hartman]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@××××××××××××.au> wrote:
> I'm having issues with the latest mix of nvidia-drivers, xorg, and
> whatever else it might be!
>
> I'm getting bad performance when switching virtual dekstops and moving
> windows and such.  GL screensavers seem to be ok though.

Same here. My fast desktop with Core i7 920, Nvidia GX 240, has a
slower KDE UI than my 6-year-old laptop that has AMD Athlon 3200+ and
ATI Radeon Mobility 9700. Simply opening a konsole window on my
desktop with compositing enabled can take 2-3 seconds, when it is
instant on the laptop.

People have been complaining about it for years, KDE and
nvidia-drivers don't always get along with each other. The usual
answer is that it works with Intel and ATI cards, and Nvidia's drivers
are closed-source, so nobody can guess what the problem is and all we
can do is hope Nvidia in their ivory tower can one day bless us with
an update that makes things better. And then of course there are
people who have Nvidia cards and everything works great and they don't
know what the complainers are talking about. :)

In my personal experience, on my Nvidia machine KDE 4.2 was the
fastest, and it has gotten slower with each subsequent KDE release
(with 4.5 being the worst one yet - so bad that I've disabled
compositing entirely). Or maybe it has gotten slower with each
nvidia-drivers release over the same period of time, I can't say.
Maybe it is all a coincidence.

However, on my old laptop with xorg radeon drivers, it has been
getting faster with each KDE release, with KDE 4.5 is the fastest one
yet. Both machines run latest everything on ~amd64. The only
significant configuration difference between the two is nvidia-drivers
vs radeon.