Warning

I do not suggest running BETA quality software (especially drivers) on any system. This page merely describes what I did to my system and how it worked out - don't expect the same and don't blame me if your system crashes.

The problem

KDE4's performance on newer NVIDIA cards of the 8xxx and 9xxx series is currently pretty choppy. For as long as I've been trying running KDE4 I had to fight an unresponsive plasma and some windows that just wouldn't resize with more than 0.5 fps.

The remedy

Lately I've been reading up on a thread on the NVIDIA forums. I found out that performance can be increased dramatically by doing the following:

Install the latest NVIDIA beta driver

Set the following options:

$ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=2

If you're lucky your KDE4 will be snappier than ever. If you're unlucky and it stays the same or gets even worse, try experimenting with the value of InitialPixmapPlacement, setting it to 1 or 3.

Apart from that I had to play around with the Advanced Effects settings as kwin's performance seemed to have dropped.

Making it permanent

Driver options set using the nvidia-settings tool reset back to default as soon as your xserver exits. To make it permanent you can add the options to the Device section of your xorg.conf:

... Section "Device" ... Option "InitialPixmapPlacement" "2" Option "GlyphCache" "1" ... EndSection "Device" ...
Troubleshooting
I haven't done a lot of testing using this setup, so in case you encounter any unwanted effects (on 3D applications or other 2D applications), please put them below.

Warning

I do not suggest running BETA quality software (especially drivers) on any system. This page merely describes what I did to my system and how it worked out - don't expect the same and don't blame me if your system crashes.