Horrible KDE4 performance.

DanielW · 2008-06-01 16:50:14

:-(

Same problem here with Nvidia Geforce 8600m-GT and closed source drivers. (core 2 duo 2,2 ghz). Disabling composing in xorg.conf doesn't make a difference.

On my Eee PC it is SOOOO much faster in windows painting/scrolling and so on. And is using sooo much less xpixmap memory.

BUT:

If I use the xorg vesa driver and not the closed source drivers from nvidia it makes a huge (possitive) difference in performance. It is faster than on the eee pc (as expected).

There seems to be similar problems with Ati graphcis. Found that on the suse websites:

"There seems to be an issue with the fglrx driver and KDE4, which causes windows to be painted/repainted very slow on KDE4, while this does not occur on KDE3."

Using vesa drivers helps (a lot!) but no hardware 3D. Google earth doesn't even draw anything.

LTSmash · 2008-06-02 01:30:33

Try by changing your video driver from i810 (deprecated) to intel (new one)...

mefiX · 2009-04-16 13:04:42

Hi,

i have an intel GM965 chipset with the newest xf86-video-intel and kde 4.2.
so far i've been trying to toggle between some values of

Option "AccelMethod"

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
i tried EXA (which i thought is the new technology), XAA and UXA.
With none of them kde had a performance where i would say "yes, i can work with it".
I turned the desktop-effects completely off, but the whole rendering of windows is damn slow and laggy.
The application that disappoints me the most is dolphin with its onMouseOver effects, they are so damn slow, furtermore, if i scroll down there with the arrow-keys, the application nearly hangs!

does somebody have some suggested settings of xorg.xonf using an intel chipset for me?

glxgears currently gives me about 1100fps (exa).

greets,
mefiX

Last edited by mefiX (2009-04-16 15:39:34)

b9anders · 2009-04-16 19:46:11

what does your xorg.conf say?

1LordAnubis · 2009-04-16 20:02:18

decent performance on my intel 945, I suppose, but its not as usable as I like. On my nvidia 6800 I get lag, and most annoyingly my idle cpu is generally 10-20%, and sometimes kwin decides to use 5-10% additional idle cpu by itself with compositing on. Such high idle cpu, and low desktop fps keeps me away; using something more snappy.

yingwuzhao · 2009-04-16 21:08:51

In my case, 7600GS, it works flawlessly, very responsive, and when idle, it shows using 0-2% cpu.
I have 2G memory, so I don't care how much KDE4 use it.

Overall, it's a quite pleasant experience, snappy and beautiful.

But one problem is that when I switch between different activities after zooming out from canvas, it begin to use more cpu suddenly and the fan begin to make noise, but when i zoom back to the desktop, it's back to the normal, guess it's a bug.

mefiX · 2009-04-17 05:43:55

Here the essentials of my xorg.conf. As you can see, i was trying several things in the device-section.

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load  "GLcore"
    Load  "dbe"
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "glx" # needed for composite
    Load  "extmod"
    Load  "synaptics"
    Load  "i2c"
    Load  "ddc"
    Load  "intel"
    Load  "int10"
    Load  "vbe"
    Load  "vgahw"
    Load  "fb"
    Load  "exa"
    Load  "ramdac"
    Load  "evdev"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
    BoardName   "Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller"
    BusID         "PCI:0:2:0"
    Option "monitor-LVDS" "Monitor0"
    Option "monitor-TMDS-1" "Monitor1"
    Option "DRI" "True"

    #VideoRam 262144
    #Option "monitor-VGA" "Monitor2"
    #>Option "AccelMethod" "exa" #xaa for composite ; exa=new
    #Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
    #>Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
    #>Option "ExaNoComposite" "true"
    #Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True" # activate for composite
    #Option "DDC" "True"    
    #Option "PageFlip" "True"
    #Option "RenderAccel" "True"    
    #Option "DevicePresence" "True" 
    #Option "CacheLines"    "32768"
    #Option "TripleBuffer"  "True"
    #Option "NoAccel" "False"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
    Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "Enable" # Enable for composite
EndSection

pawels64 · 2009-04-17 15:48:38

Cimi wrote:

neowolf wrote:
KDE tends to be faster than Gnome in my experience and in most benchmarks I've read, and KDE4's supposed to only be faster than KDE3.
That being said, the OP's problem may involve the new effects being employed in KDE4. If hardware acceleration isn't set up properly and they're enabled, performance is likely to be horrendous. (Just like it would be running Compiz on a system without it!)
The compositor integrated in kwin4 is a lot slower than compiz, you can't compare to it.
Here, with a 6800gt (great video card) kde4 lags...

There are longstanding problems with nvidia binary blobs and KDE 4 (about year of complaining on their forum). Maybe they improved the drivers, but don't expect miracles... If KDE 4 is slow for someone it's in 99% drivers fault. Even Open Source Ati drivers don't fully accelerate KDE 4 yet. If you want to compare QT4 vs GTK* QT is clear winner and the same about KDE 4 when comes to performance, just lack of good drivers... Oh, and you have good card, but crappy drivers.

Last edited by pawels64 (2009-04-17 19:14:48)

mefiX · 2009-04-21 17:30:52

I tried the Chakra-LiveCD on an usb-stick.
Here i have a pretty good KDE4-performance which kinda confuses me, because glxgears only gives me about ~200fps, so maybe glxgears ain't a good indicator for 2D-performance!
I checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log and it telled me that the xserver was using EXA as acceleration method (using the intel-driver of course).

The whole thing is really weird, because i can't reproduce the performance i had on the chakra-livecd on my productive machine (archlinux).
My instinct is tellin' me that it has smth. to do with QT ...

Last edited by mefiX (2009-04-21 17:31:43)

9a3eedi · 2009-12-21 09:28:06

I know this is an old thread, and I may be bumping it up, but I'm just going to post my thoughts..

I'm running KDE4.3 on a Core i7 Machine and an ATI 5870 with compositing on. The performance is pretty usable, but considering the hardware I have, I was expecting more. Some effects have slowdowns, resizing windows takes too long, and moving plasmoids around and rotating them shouldn't be that slow afaik (doesn't the graphics card handle that?)

I know this isn't a graphics card driver issue because compiz + gnome works extremely flawlessly.

Still, it's usable, and I still love and prefer KDE4 over gnome, so I'll bear with it

quarkup · 2009-12-21 10:36:01

I have PIV 2.6, Intel (i810 driver) video, 512MB of ram on my laptop and KDE4 works terrible for me. I've tried maaaany releases and builds and I just can't get it to work fast enough.

disable compositing, disable the ipv6 for kde and try to use another renderer.
I would guess a fluxbox in your machine would run faster (using the kde apps)

csslayer · 2009-12-21 10:59:13

9a3eedi wrote:

I know this is an old thread, and I may be bumping it up, but I'm just going to post my thoughts..
I'm running KDE4.3 on a Core i7 Machine and an ATI 5870 with compositing on. The performance is pretty usable, but considering the hardware I have, I was expecting more. Some effects have slowdowns, resizing windows takes too long, and moving plasmoids around and rotating them shouldn't be that slow afaik (doesn't the graphics card handle that?)
I know this isn't a graphics card driver issue because compiz + gnome works extremely flawlessly.
Still, it's usable, and I still love and prefer KDE4 over gnome, so I'll bear with it

Resize window is slow maybe because you are using catalyst as driver, try open source or the patched xorg-server : xorg-server-catalyst-maximize-fix in AUR (it will cause some display corruption but more speed, corruption will be less with compiz).

Any way, if compiz doesn't has a bug with kdelibs-experimental, it works perfect with kde.

heaven · 2010-03-31 17:58:02

Hi guys. I have some problem with KDE and slow scrolling. Immediately after rebooting scrolling works just fine, but when I run kopete, amarok, ktorrent, kmail and firefox and after a while — begin lags, scrolling is a slow and runs choppy. When I close one of the runned applications (for example kopete) — again scrolling works as expected. After some time all repeat again.
I tried do this — http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA but nothing.

I use x86_64 build with KDE 4.4 and have nvidia 9500gt video.

Arch Linux

#26 2008-06-01 16:50:14

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#27 2008-06-02 01:30:33

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#28 2009-04-16 13:04:42

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#29 2009-04-16 19:46:11

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#30 2009-04-16 20:02:18

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#31 2009-04-16 21:08:51

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#32 2009-04-17 05:43:55

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#33 2009-04-17 15:48:38

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#34 2009-04-21 17:30:52

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#35 2009-12-21 09:28:06

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#36 2009-12-21 10:36:01

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#37 2009-12-21 10:59:13

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

#38 2010-03-31 17:58:02

Re: Horrible KDE4 performance.

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