If you are having performance issues with Plasma, it's most likely that your graphics card driver has issues with the fancy hotness known cryptically as "ARGB visuals". In plain terms, they let us do fancy translucency. Without them, you still get a nicely composited desktop, but the panel will not be translucent, popups will look a bit more plain and you won't get all the hot sizzle you deserve from Plasma.
Still, for some, that's the only option. Today I was talking with a fellow on IRC who manages thin client KDE deployments in school environments, and they have the challenge of old hardware for which there is no realistic chance of new and improved drivers appearing. It occurred to me that we ought to have an environment variable for this.
When I opened up the appropriate source file, I was delighted to see Seli had already stumbled upon this idea and implemented it. Huzzah for open source!
So for those in such situations, you can selectively turn off ARGB visuals when Plasma starts simply by ensuring that the KDE_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS environment variable is set to the value "1" (without the quotes, obviously ;) and life will be slightly sweeter for you, if a little less pretty.
This appeared during the 4.2 dev cycle, so KDE 4.1 users are probably out luck ... but you wanted 4.2 anyways, right? ;)
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
It would be great if this was an option in the settings. Perhaps in the advanced tab of the effects where you also can choose between xrender and opengl.
yeah this is probably a silly question, but exactly where is that variable to be set? i'm assuming it's a .conf file in .kde but if anyone wants to give me a hint, i'd be down with that.
@klaatu: it's an environment variable, so you can either use it as a one off, like:
KDE_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 plasma
or put something like this in your .profile (or equivalent):
export KDE_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
thanks! can't wait for 4.2!
Oh, wow!!
Suddenly resizing the Plasma "Add Widgets" dialog went from taking 4 seconds to complete to being just as "quick" as any regular Qt4 dialog!
I'm quite serious when I say that this simple trick just might be what finally makes me move to KDE4 (KDE3 is hard to give up)!
Thanks! Me happy! :D
I have found out another tip that it might help others.
When i was enabling kwin effects, some of them were smooth (minimizing) but some of them weren't (like maximizing). I found out that setting Keep window thumbnails to Always, helped that problem. Now most of them are smooth. I don't know if there is a wiki with tips like that.
Speaking of tips, does KDE_NVIDIA_HACK=1 still applies?
I'm using nvidia legacy drivers.
Oh, and another thing. When i zoom out in order to see other activities, cpu usage goes 100% from plasma and xorg (around 50% each)
any way to query your graphic driver to know if it supports ARGB visuals ?
Post a Comment