Arch Linux

dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

With KDE4.2 beta finally out and some recent releases of the NVIDIA drivers (at least in beta), I'm wondering if anyone has some optimal settings to propose.

I jumped off the KDE4 wagon a couple of months ago because I finally got tired of the sluggish video, which a lot of people were attributing at least partially to NVIDIA's drivers.

I know there's been a lot of discussion of this over the past few months, but I thought if somebody could post the current state of things, it could be helpful.

Thanks.

Last edited by dhave (2009-01-27 20:12:54)

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tanis

Member

From: Poland / Waterloo, ON, Canada

Registered: 2007-04-21

Posts: 259

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

There is KDE 4.2.0 in [extra] already. And it's not a beta. It was beta quite a long time ago, since then there was already a RC release
I have never had those performance issues with nvidia nad KDE4, but current nvidia driver in [extra] (180.22) improved displaying of some elements in KDE 4.2.

The only problem I have is broken background of icons in systray. But this is confirmed bug in Qt that has been fixed in code for Qt 4.5.

Last edited by tanis (2009-01-27 19:06:10)

dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

There is KDE 4.2.0 in [extra] already. And it's not a beta. It was beta quite a long time ago, since then there was already a RC release

Yeah, I've been running 4.2 since it hit extra last night, but for some reason I thought it was still in beta. I guess I lost track of things.

I have never had those performance issues with nvidia nad KDE4, but current nvidia driver in [extra] (180.22) improved displaying of some elements in KDE 4.2.

The only problem I have is broken background of icons in systray. But this is confirmed bug in Qt that has been fixed in code for Qt 4.5.

So far things are looking pretty good with NVIDIA 177.82 driver (64-bit). I did have 180.22 installed, but I reverted to 177.82 last week after I starting having some strange screen artifacts.

I'd still be interested in hearing about optimal settings, especially from people who previously had trouble with NVIDIA drivers and KDE4.x.

Thanks.

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lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

It's okay here with 180.22 and QT_NO_GLIB=1. kwin eats ~10% cpu time when playing movies though and some visual quirks appear when notifications show on a playing movie, but there's a very handy shortcut, ctrl-shift-f12, which toggles desktop effects on/off, and that's what I use whenever I use mplayer.

Roberth

Member

From: The Pale Blue Dot

Registered: 2007-01-12

Posts: 894

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

There is KDE 4.2.0 in [extra] already. And it's not a beta. It was beta quite a long time ago, since then there was already a RC release

Yeah, I've been running 4.2 since it hit extra last night, but for some reason I thought it was still in beta. I guess I lost track of things.

I have never had those performance issues with nvidia nad KDE4, but current nvidia driver in [extra] (180.22) improved displaying of some elements in KDE 4.2.

The only problem I have is broken background of icons in systray. But this is confirmed bug in Qt that has been fixed in code for Qt 4.5.

So far things are looking pretty good with NVIDIA 177.82 driver (64-bit). I did have 180.22 installed, but I reverted to 177.82 last week after I starting having some strange screen artifacts.

I'd still be interested in hearing about optimal settings, especially from people who previously had trouble with NVIDIA drivers and KDE4.x.

Thanks.

New version of the nvidia driver has been released, maybe it fixes your issues...

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dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

So far things are looking pretty good with NVIDIA 177.82 driver (64-bit). I did have 180.22 installed, but I reverted to 177.82 last week after I starting having some strange screen artifacts.

I'd still be interested in hearing about optimal settings, especially from people who previously had trouble with NVIDIA drivers and KDE4.x.

Thanks.

New version of the nvidia driver has been released, maybe it fixes your issues...

Newer than 180.22? I haven't run across anything newer, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

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Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

There's nothing newer than 180.22 that I can find - not beta, not unofficial, nothing.

Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-01-27 23:43:45)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthr … ?p=1914053

Pse

Member

Registered: 2008-03-15

Posts: 413

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

There's nothing newer than 180.22 that I can find - not beta, not unofficial, nothing.

How about these?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … 8025&num=1

Last edited by Pse (2009-01-27 23:46:27)

Hohoho

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 222

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I have a Geforce 8600M GT video card on a laptop.
Compared to Gnome KDE 4.2 is less responsive and slower. I don't know whats wrong with KWin but whenever there's a window switch it just hangs for a fraction of a sec. It just feels that everything I do has some very short, but noticeable delay.
All the desktop effects work OK. But for example scrolling in Konqueror just plain sucks on slightly more heavy sites (Slashdot for example).
Waiting for better drivers

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

Huh. Seems like NVIDIA's main site is not the most up-to-date, then.

dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthr … ?p=1914053

Nice. From the choices for x86_64, how do I know whether to choose *pkg0.run, *pkg1.run or *pkg2.run?

Edit: I see on  this page that *pkg2.run was the correct file for 180.22, so I'm assuming the same is true for 180.25.

Last edited by dhave (2009-01-28 04:17:26)

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lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I don't really know what's the difference. Arch's packages use pkg1, but I've been using pkg0 without problems as well.

-edit-

Now I see that Arch uses pkg0! Sly. They must be after me.

Last edited by lucke (2009-01-28 05:11:43)

dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I don't really know what's the difference. Arch's packages use pkg1, but I've been using pkg0 without problems as well.

-edit-

Now I see that Arch uses pkg0! Sly. They must be after me.

After reading your post, I went with pkg0. It seems to be working fine, so far. We'll see ....

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igster

Member

From: Sarasota, Florida, USA

Registered: 2004-08-24

Posts: 9

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I'm running 4.2 on an 8800GT using the copy of nvidia 180.22 from extra.  Only (minor) problem I've had is the systray background.  Performance is overall very good.  No sluggish behavior as far as I can tell.

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I am also on 4.2, with an 8800GT. Until the latest NVIDIA driver, video was very sluggish but now it is quite smooth.

Chrysalis

Member

Registered: 2008-07-07

Posts: 155

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I don't really know what's the difference. Arch's packages use pkg1, but I've been using pkg0 without problems as well.

-edit-

Now I see that Arch uses pkg0! Sly. They must be after me.

After reading your post, I went with pkg0. It seems to be working fine, so far. We'll see ....

use nvidia-beta from aur and bump pkgver (its usually updated pretty fast too)

EDIT: i speak to quick, its at 180.25 in aur already

Last edited by Chrysalis (2009-01-28 20:55:58)

Chrysalis

Member

Registered: 2008-07-07

Posts: 155

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

Looks like suspend was fixed finally and quite a few other things

Chrysalis

Member

Registered: 2008-07-07

Posts: 155

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

@dhave - optimal settings are 'defaults' with 180+ (all the stuff you had to tweak with 177 for kde are enabled by default with 180+) so just remove all fancy settings you might have from the old driver and it should just work tm. (probably why you had problems the first time you tried it)

Last edited by Chrysalis (2009-01-28 21:17:57)

Hohoho

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 222

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

Here's an interesting thing I just found.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/28/218259
Open that site in Konqueror, and scroll down till the little box starts following and simply scroll around.
Using Nvidia's driver (180.22) it's very jerky at first, then it gets slightly less jerky and stays that way.
Using the xorg's nv driver everything is pretty slow, but the scrolling is very fast.
Nvidia still has some serious issues with their 2d part of the driver.

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

Firefox scrolls just as speedy as ever. I don't think it's an nVidia bug, but a Konqueror one. Firefox never slowed a bit on KDE 4.2 w/ nVidia 180.22 drivers, but Konqueror got kludgy and slow.

I'd chalk that one up to Konqueror.

Last edited by mrunion (2009-01-29 00:28:07)

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Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."

Hohoho

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 222

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

That's weird, because Firefox behaves exactly the same, a lot of jerkiness first, then as something probably got cached enough it gets faster, but still jerky.
Xorg's nv driver gets choked by Firefox though.

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

That is definitely odd. Do you have smooth-scrolling on or of in Firefox? (I don't know if that matters, but mine is off and that's all I can think of that may be different.)

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Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."

Chrysalis

Member

Registered: 2008-07-07

Posts: 155

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

its fast here too (konq, opera, firefox), not sure who thought of putting that box on top of the left bar though, much better if you toggle it on top.

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: NVIDIA+KDE4.2: progress report?

I'd just like to say that thanks to you lucke, I now have a stable, smooth and fast KDE4.2

I was experiencing artefacts and then unrecoverable crashes every 5 minutes or so with KDE 4.2 and the 180.22 drivers and after installing the 180.25 drivers everything is perfect and suspend works now and is very fast.

So thank you and thank you again.

Now I have to decide if I'm game enough to try the 180.27 drivers :-)