Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 30th Mar 2008 20:34 UTC, submitted by michuk
"Considering that the previous revisions were surprisingly unstable, I can honestly call this one the most stable of the ones I have tested until now. I experienced only one crash and the performance was more than satisfactory. Now I can be almost sure that when a stable edition of KDE 4.1 is published, I will definitely say good bay to my old good KDE 3.5."
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Member since:
2005-07-07
On somewhat modest kit I'd say the performance is on par with 3.5. My primary desktop is 2 Ghz single core AMD processor, with an AGP ATI x700 video card, and 2 GB bog standard RAM, and 7200 RPM disks.
I have observed:
-Starting KDE seems to be about the same, or a bit faster.
-RAM and CPU usage after starting with KDE 4 (Kwin + Plasma + Autostarted things) vs. KDE 3 (Kwin + Kicker + Autostarted things) seems about par. Maybe a hair more CPU in KDE 4, but with what seems like less stuff cached in RAM.)
-Plasma applets seem responsive, and the shipped apps when compared to KDE 3 seem roughly the same. (Maybe just a hair slower...)
-I'm noticing a bit of lag after clicking on a menu item under KDE 4, and a bit of lag with the repaint after the menu goes away. In general repaint feels a bit slower, but nothing 'bad'.
-Most of the new frameworks seem roughly par to the old ones wrt to CPU and Memory.
-Most apps that have a direct KDE 3 lineage seem much nicer (As in more gloss, new features, cleaner, and with better configs) under KDE 4 barring some regressions. Performance wise they seem on par with KDE 3. The KDE 4 'desktop proper' needs to cover a bunch of feature regressions though. That might come with overhead.
If your KDE 4 experience is 'bad':
-Look into your video drivers. I'm finding 'new' open radeon drivers are working well.
-Look at your vendor packages. They weren't all created equally for 4.0.0.
Looking forward, KDE 4's performance should be bright because there is probably a whole whack of micro-optimising that can be done, and even without that it isn't generally 'dog slow' vs KDE 3.
I'd be interested to hear from somebody who has integrated video, on a 512 Mb memory, 700 MHz, 5X00 RPM HD box though. On semi-recent kit with decent drivers and packages you'd be hard pressed to notice much of a difference, IMHO.