Anyone else notice that when you use compiz and kde 4.1 the animations and effects are chopy and slow to react?? They do work but not smoothly.
Im using a nvidia 8600 gt with the newest drivers from the repo.
yup! this problem is well known by kde developpers and they fused nvidia’s driver about that. They are talking about it here: K Desktop Environment - KDE 4.1 RC1 Release Announcement and here: User:Lemma/GPU-Performance - KDE TechBase
Well, I have a Sony Vaio PCG-TR2AP and I’m getting significant compiz slowness in KDE 4.1. It was fine (maybe a little slow) in 4.0.
I believe I have something on the lines of a Intel 82852/82855… I have “855 GM” in my xorg.conf.
I don’t think it is restricted to just nvidia drivers.
Having never reported an issue like this I wonder how I can get some visibility here.
There is newest driver (released today) at:
Linux Display Driver - x86
Bear in mind, to install this form of nvidia driver, it needs compiler, make,
kernel-sources, etc. To get that, select patterns (instead of search), and
and choose ‘base development’, and install all that.
Also, you’ll need to remember to re-compile/install
this package again anytime the openSUSE kernel gets updated.
Otherwise, just wait (probably in a few more days!?,) this new driver should get
packaged into the SUSE-specific repository.
Does it resolve the slowness issue?
From what I’ve read, this release does not address the issues with KDE4.1.
Is your desktop effects turned on?
It well help a bit if it is turned on but take out some features anyway you already have compiz.
In my case I just turn on the transparency
To clarify, those issues have nothing to do with compiz. They are related to kwin4 and the native compositing in KDE4. The nvidia devs have acknowledged that kwin4 uses driver features they aren’t fully supporting, and are working towards properly handling them.
Compiz is a separate project from KDE, and has no dependencies on KDE, nor is it formally supported in KDE4 any more than it was in KDE3. Having said that, it should still work. If there are issues with performance, it’s a different issue. Could still be nVidia related, but it’s not necessarily the same as the KDE4 nvidia issues. The compiz forums might provide more insight, I know they helped me a lot when I was using compiz under KDE3… 
Cheers,
KV
Ditto to KV’s remarks above.
I have no issues when I run Compiz. Mostly though I just stick with kwin. Flashy effects are great - but can be anoying on a PC you work from.
There may be some help here or links within
Compiz Fusion - openSUSE
I’m using the same driver and experiencing video being choppy. There are some workarounds floating around that will improve your opengl performance that might improve the rendering speed of compiz.
I’m pretty sure there’s a bug in the xorg driver.
The workarounds are in this thread :
Video is choppy - openSUSE Forums
but it’s using the depreciated method and the intel batch environment variable has a bug with games.
Please note : This is only for intel video cards.
Also Sony fiddle a lot with the hardware they push out using software so that’s why there will be a lot of model specific software and drivers for your Vaio to install if you were using windows so unless you start hacking it yourself, You might find that it’s difficult to get everything working on Linux.
A Sony Vaio is a really bad choice as a Linux laptop. They use cheap hardware and try to tweak it using windows software and drivers.
Please Nvidia fix your drivers :’(
I dont know how much longer I can wait…