not wanting to intrude into the other thread “11.2 on older hardware” I have the following
if, for example you grab a window and drag it across the screen, it doesn’t move fluidly but rather jerks across the screen.
Resizing open windows has the same jerky feel also
This is one example but it happens on all sorts of apps, general laggy behaviour, streaming video is also, not so much laggy, but easily lagged (for want of a better desciption)
New install of 11.2 with kde 4.3.1 release 6 on a 6 year old 2gz intel celeron cpu, 512 ram and an nvidia geforce fx5200 (0x0322) with the nv driver (no fancy desktop yet)
At the login screen (you need auto-login disabled): You should have a login session selection for IceWM. Try it. Open some windows and try moving them around, is it any better.
512MB of RAM will mean you can not run much more than a small number of apps at the same time. The less the # of apps running, the better. Is your FX5200 a PCI-e, AGP, or PCI card?
The proprietary nVidia driver has significantly superior performance for video. I have the proprietary nVidia driver installed on my sandbox PC, a 9-year old 32-bit AMD Athlon-1100 w/1GB RAM (MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard) w/AGP nVidia GeForce FX5200 graphics and I do not see such behaviour.
I installed the proprietary nVidia driver “the hardway” (which was not hard) and there is a significant performance improvement: NVIDIA/The hard way - openSUSE
It is possible to install the proprietary driver via a repository, but I don’t do it that way myself, so other than offering this link, I can’t provide much help: NVIDIA - openSUSE
I confess I’m not a one-click install user. I prefer to have more insight as to what is happening on my pc.
If you compare different PCs, you need to compare more than the graphic hardware and the desktop. You also need to compare what graphic driver, what resolution, what application, and precisely what settings applied in any application. Also, special if one has special desktop effects applied in KDE4 then one needs to compare to a KDE3 with the same special desktop effects applied.
Reference the “hardway” (which is not hard) there are lengthy instructions here: NVIDIA/The hard way - openSUSE … Its a lot easier than it looks. Most of it is bread-and-butter stuff for new users who have never done this before. Once one has the “motus operanda” in place, its very quick.
I don’t see the massive CPU loads that you are referring to. When I am playing a video on my athlon-1100 with a nVidia FX5200, its not uncommon for npviewer.bin to have cpu loads of 40% or higher.
it’s a PCI not AGP card, just checked, not sure why I assumed it was AGP.
in the graphic window size in Bios, the default setting is 128mb, am I correct in saying that a higher number would assign more RAM to the video side of the total cpu usage
A PCI card … that makes a big difference. A PCI card WILL be a lot slower than an AGP card for nominal video playback/decoding that does not use VDPAU.
I have a nVidia FX5200 AGP card in my athlon-1100 (with 1GB RAM), which will see CPU loads of 40% or so when playing youtube videos.
On a much faster athlon-2800 PC (with 2GB RAM), I have a nVidia GeForce 8400GS PCI card (which is a much more capable card, but on a slower PCI bus) , which when playing a youtube video will see firefox (npviewer.bin) cpu levels of 55% and xorg of 35% and kwin of 10%. … the advantage of the 8400GS PCI card is I can play AVCHD high definition videos on that PC using VDPAU with the 8400GS card, that I can not do with the FX5200.
I also note my 8400GS card has 512MB of RAM.
I think (not sure) my FX5200 has 256MB of RAM - I need to check.
But there is a massive difference between a PCI bus and an AGP bus. I suspect your other PC has the equivalent of an AGP bus?
