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

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 17:24 on Tuesday 26 October 2010, Paul Hartman 
did opine thusly:

> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.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.

Let me weep on your shoulder with you. This laptop has a pair of these:

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 23
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T9300  @ 2.50GHz
 
4G RAM, 1920x1200 screen and this video card:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600M GT] 
(rev a1)

and nvidia-drivers-260.19.12

KDE performance is pathetic especially with compositing enabled. It was really 
bad sometime around 4.3 with that screw up in the driver for resizing windows. 
Some releases are better, some worse. I'm getting disheartened trying to 
figure out what to downgrade: mesa, xorg, drivers, kde....

A colleague has the identical machine running Ubuntu. Gnome flies on that. I 
don't want to go to Ubuntu - I detest it on a laptop and detest Gnome even 
more. I might go back to e17 and just put up with the reduced desktop 
functionality.




> 
> 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.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com