User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA
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 (currently 177.13)
- Make sure you the NVIDIA kernel module gets loaded by rebooting or rmmod/modprobe. Of course you'll also have to restart xorg.
- Check if you're using the right driver (/proc/driver/nvidia/version, glxinfo)
- Set the following options:
$ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1
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"
...
Experiences
Here I'd like to collect some information about the circumstances this setup will work better in. Please post your experiences to the table below:
| Name | Card | Kernel | I.P.P. | G.C. | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lemma | 8600 GTS | 2.6.25 | 2 | 1 | huge |
- I.P.P. = InitialPixmapPlacement
- G.C. = GlyphCache
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.