At the moment Kde4 is totally unusable on my system due to Nvidia’s lack of 2D acceleration.
Any news on when that might be fixed? I would like to use Kde4 just to get the feel of it and know how everything works so I can instruct others in it’s use.
The latest version (kde4.12) works well on my system with a gforce 7600.
What card do you have and what version of kde4?
Most of the problems were fixed in the last beta drivers (177.68 and above).
Changes since 177.76:
Fixed a performance regression affecting the gtkperf lines and circles test.
Updated the X driver to consider /sys/class/power_supply when determining the AC power state.
Fixed corruption when using SLI in SFR mode with OpenGL-based composite managers.Changes since 177.70:
Added support for the following new GPUs:
GeForce 9500 GT
Fixed a bug that caused GPU errors when applications used the X RENDER extension’s repeating modes in conjunction with color-index overlays or rotation on GeForce 7 series and older GPUs.
Fixed a bug that caused system hangs when using the NV-CONTROL interface to change GPU clock frequencies.
Fixed a text rendering performance regression on GeForce 7 series and older GPUs when InitialPixmapPlacement is set to 2.
Updated mode validation, in cases when no EDID is detected, such that 1024x768 @ 60Hz and 800x600 @ 60Hz are allowed, rather than just 640x480 @ 60Hz.
Improved power management support.
Improved compatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels.
Fixed a regression that caused the ‘Auto’ SLI X option setting to not enable SLI.
Added a workaround for broken EDIDs provided by some Acer AL1512 monitors.Changes since 177.68:
Added support for the following new GPUs:
GeForce 9800 GTX+
GeForce 9800 GT
GeForce 8100P
nForce 780a SLI
nForce 750a SLI
Quadro FX 770M
Quadro NVS 160M
Quadro NVS 150M
Improved support for RENDER operations with the same source and destination; this should enhance performance in some situations, e.g. when dragging Plasma applets in KDE4.
Fixed a text rendering performance regression that affected GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
Fixed a regression that caused text to be missing or corrupt on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
Fixed a regression responsible for false negatives during SLI video bridge detection attempts after X server restarts.
Fixed a bug that resulted in AGP FW/SBA settings and overrides being applied incorrectly when using the Linux kernel’s AGP GART driver.
Fixed a bug that caused initialization of the builtin AGP GART driver (NvAGP) to fail.Changes between 177.67 and 177.68:
Added support for the GeForce 9700M GTS.
Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and OpenGL implementation; this should improve performance with e.g. the KDE4 OpenGL compositing manager.
Fixed a RENDER corruption bug on GeForce 6 and 7 GPUs.
Fixed a bug that caused GLXBadDrawable errors to be generated when running more than one OpenGL application with anti-aliasing enabled on GeForce 6 and 7 GPUs, e.g. wine.
Fixed a bug that caused GPU errors when killing the X server while an OpenGL application is running.
Fixed a bug on GeForce 8, 9 and GTX GPUs that caused dynamic display configuration to fail on GPUs not currently driving an X screen.
See 177.78 (BETA) for Linux x86/x86-64 released - nV News Forums for more information and d/l link (you will need to apply the “hard way” of the NVIDIA - openSUSE installation tutorial)
I’m running Kde 4.12 and Nvidia 177.67. Glad to see some new drivers. I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend. My video card is an 8800GT.
Right now Kde is running pretty well. I’ll update the vid drivers and see how that goes.
Thanks. 
I’m running a GeForce 8800 GT and having no trouble. I did download the current drivers and there is a command (sorry, I don’t remember it) that has to be run in terminal to enable it.
Previous versions of Kde4 had trouble with 2D performance with Nvidia drivers. When I would resize a window by dragging a corner it took forever. Seems to be fixed now. Still, I might try the newer beta drivers to see if they fixed 2D. It’s still slower than Xfce4.
Thanks.
mooreted schreef:
Chris Maaskant
Thanks. That’s what I’m running now from the same page. I might try the newest beta just to see how it goes.
Appreciate the help. 
Tips : nVidia 177.80 (standard, not beta!) are now ready to be installed !
Release Highlights:
Added support for the following new GPUs:
GeForce GTX 260
GeForce GTX 280
GeForce 9800 GTX+
GeForce 9800 GT
GeForce 9700M GTS
GeForce 9500 GT
GeForce 8100P
nForce 780a SLI
nForce 750a SLI
Quadro FX 770M
Quadro NVS 160M
Quadro NVS 150M
Improved support for RENDER masks, as well as RENDER repeating modes and transformations, for video memory pixmaps.
Added accelerated support for RENDER convolution filters for video memory pixmaps on GeForce 8, 9 and GTX GPUs.
Improved support for RENDER operations with the same source and destination; this should performance in some situations, e.g. when dragging Plasma applets in KDE4.
Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and OpenGL implementation; this should improve performance with e.g. the KDE4 OpenGL compositing manager.
Added an ‘AllowSHMPixmaps’ X configuration option, which can be used to prevent applications from using shared memory pixmaps; the latter may cause some optimizations in the NVIDIA X driver to be disabled.
Fixed a text rendering performance regression that affected GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
Fixed a regression that caused the ‘Auto’ SLI X option setting to not enable SLI.
Fixed a bug that caused system hangs when using the NV-CONTROL interface to change GPU clock frequencies.
Added support for DisplayPort display devices (including 30-bit devices).
Resolved various stability problems on GeForce 8, 9 and GTX GPUs, as well as some GeForce 6 and 7 PCI-E GPUs.
Fixed a bug that resulted in GPU errors when changing the TwinView display configuration while using Compiz.
Further improved the error recovery paths taken in case of GPU command stream corruption.
Updated mode validation, in cases when no EDID is detected, such that 1024x768 @ 60Hz and 800x600 @ 60Hz are allowed, rather than just 640x480 @ 60Hz.
Removed an old workaround that caused incorrect Xinerama information to be reported after enabling a second TwinView display.
Fixed corruption when using SLI in SFR mode with OpenGL-based composite managers.
Fixed the subpicture component order reported by the NVIDIA X driver’s XvMC implementation.
Added a workaround for broken EDIDs provided by some Acer AL1512 monitors.
Fixed a bug that caused GLXBadDrawable errors to be generated when running more than one OpenGL application with anti-aliasing enabled on GeForce 6 and 7 GPUs, e.g. wine.
Fixed a problem that could result in IRQs being disabled on some multi-GPU SMP configurations.
Worked around cache flushing problems (on some Linux kernels) that caused corruption and stability problems.
Added experimental support for PCI-E MSI.
Fixed a bug that resulted in AGP FW/SBA settings and overrides being applied incorrectly when using the Linux kernel’s AGP GART driver.
Improved compatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels.
Updated the X driver to consider /sys/class/power_supply when determining the AC power state.
See 177.80 for Linux x86/x86-64 released - nV News Forums for download link.