I’m using KDE 4.2.1 on openSUSE 11.1, and everything seems to be working fine, as far as speed and performance go. However, there are some minor issues with the graphics that I’m not necessairily comfy with. There are a lot of smudgy graphics, such as, when moving the mouse around on the desktop, or anywhere for that matter, icons within the task bar, like the Volume and system update icons, appear to smudge very bad, and after a bit they go back to normal, only to repeat the process again. Same this happens with text. Black lines and boxes randomly appear on the screen while also moving the mouse around the desktop or windows. The Application Launcher sometimes displays lines or offset text when opening. The desktop cube, when accessed, appears completely black, with only a little bit of gray outlining the top and bottom of the cube. My graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 9500GT, with the latest drivers for my version of SUSE, and processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo (I doubt that makes a difference). I’ve ran all system updates and everything appears to be in order. I do not have Compiz or Compiz Fusion installed, and am solely using the built in effects with KDE. Anyone else have this problem? Is there a fix to this issue (patches/repositories I may need), and what can I do about it?? Thanks so much for your help!!
Do you have the Qt45 packages installed?
Did you rebuild your desktop by removing the plasmarc and plasma-appletrc from /home/username/.kde/share/config ?
Especially the first one changed my desktop completely: very smooth, very polished.
It appears I am having the same/similar problem with the same graphics card (9500GT 512MB). I am running oS 11.1/KDE 4.1.3 with nVidia drivers 185.13 (need the newest version for the VDPAU branch of xbmc). Most of the effects work well (I haven’t noticed any smudging or problems with the app launcher like ssccrab is), for me it seems only the full screen effects are screwed up. For example, if I try to use the desktop cube, I can see the gray “caps” of the cube and the label at the bottom, but it’s otherwise a black screen. Switching between desktops also gives a black screen for about a second (assuming this should be a rotating cube animation). After attempting to use one of these effects, I get the strange black lines/boxes for a few seconds, as well. They seem to generate with mouse movement… like surround parts of the screen as you move your mouse around. It’s hard to describe.
Running glxgears in full screen I get about 4300 fps. Compositing is on. Direct rendering is enabled.
Just as a test, I installed compiz-fusion and it produced the same results. All the other effects worked great… anything full screen 3D did not. I have since uninstalled it.
@ ssccrab: which driver version are you using? I wonder if this is a problem of the card, the driver, or just coincidence?