hello there,
i’ve got an nvidia gforce 7600 go video card on my laptop. i’m using latest 177 nvidia drivers.
with these drivers:
performance is actually good in KDE4, i.e. it’s usually smooth and reactive ;
stability is an issue: i have small display freezes here and there, sometimes with small visual artefacts. this is slightly annoying at first, but becomes very irritating after a while ;
using Kwin desktop effects (OpenGL), i sometimes get very disturbing visual artefacts, that can end up with a nearly unusable desktop. I tried to enable Xrender but that’s a no-go: my configuration is being reverted to OpenGL.
Is anyone having similar troubles with nvidia on kde 4.1.1 ?
It was working great for me, until the updates last week, it seems every time I find ways to make KDE 4.1 work smoothly with nvidia, they release an update that breaks it.
It seems the conventional wisdom in KDE4 development is one step forward, three steps back, wash, rinse, repeat.
All 3D effects in compiz and other applications work outstanding.
I had KDE4 working well on my machines after a lot of research into the issues surrounding KDE4 and nvidia. Then last week, a new round of updates came in, and nothing I do can get KDE4 and nvidia to work together.
Nvidia has been working to resolve the issues, unfortunately they are shooting at a moving target, they had posted performance settings that worked extremely well, and had my system with KDE4.1 working great, then the KDE4 devs broke it all.
I have been using the same driver throughout, so my driver hasn’t changed, KDE 4.1 on the other hand has changed numerous times, getting worse with each update.
Whatever it is they are doing, it seems they simply don’t want to play nice with nvidia 3D drivers. Whether it is intentional or not is irrelevant I suppose, as broke is broke, I am however beginning to think they are breaking compatibility on purpose.
I have the same card, and am using KDE 4.1 from the Factory repo last updated ~5 days ago. Still using the 173 driver.
There are known problems between the nvidia driver and Plasma (AFAIK not kwin). On this wkstn, X is stable but I needed to add several options to xorg.conf to reduce the stuttering (like when windows are resized). In kwin I seemed to get an improvement changing OpenGL to shared memory. The most annoying issue I continue to have is with screensavers; sometimes the saver only displays in a quarter of the desktop with the rest being just white - this doesn’t happen every time, abt 80% of the time.
The nvidia forums have many complaints about 2D in the driver (including 177), not specific to KDE or openSUSE. I tried to enable Compiz (which I used from the beginning with 3.5) and the display crapped out real bad. This is going to take a while to sort out, but people are working on it.
Er, nVidia has already acknowledged their fault. KDE4 uses standard functions that nVidia didn’t anticipate having to support, because until KDE4 they simply weren’t used. They know this, they’ve said this, and they admit that they’re working on a fix.
Any workarounds you’ve seen have come from nvnews.net, which isn’t an official nvidia forum, and while it is full of useful information, and has some participation from nvidia devs, does not constitute official support from nvidia.
I’ll admit it must be frustrating for those nvidia users suffering through these issues, but since nVidia has admitted fault, how about we cut the KDE devs some slack? They’ve been in communication with nVidia, and if there is fault to lay for KDE, it is because they won’t implement ugly hacks and workarounds just to support proprietary nVidia drivers.
FWIW, my nvidia setup works great with KDE4. Probably doesn’t make you feel better to hear that, but just wanted to point out that it’s not a universal issue affecting everyone.
nVidia is working towards a fix, and the beta releases for the new driver have been addressing this. Just give it time.
I’ve been running kde4.1 in suse11.1 for a month-ish. konsole resizing has been slow, so I tried some of these fixes.
my kde session can now crap out at any time without warning dumping me back at the login prompt.
I don’t know it it’s also connected to a recent upgrade of nvidia driver to 180.22 from 180.17; I shall probably try a downgrade if I can’t make it stable.
:’(
If I’m not mistaken, there are a few cards that have been troublesome for Nvidia.
Using NVS 140 with KDE 4.2 (final) from factory, and its smooth.
I compiled the (Fresh today) Nvidia 180.25 driver and installed it. It solved a few issues wrt restarting x when logging out, suspend/hibernate and a few other minor issues.
The gobbled screen issue when the driver is activated is still there, but not as bad as it was.