Linked by Guillaume Maillard on Thu 10th Oct 2002 05:44 UTC
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
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The only things I can think of that cause those kinds of screen redraw problems are:
1) the system is bogged down (has little/no resources left)
2) One of the windows in the image has stopped responding
Of course, another issue is that a window moved around the screen very quickly will not redraw it's entire surface while moving or resizing (to preserve resources), so if you take a screenshot in the middle of such an operation, you can get a shot that looks really bad, even though you normally wouldn't notice the problem at all. With certain types of resources visible in the background, it's fairly easy to reproduce these types of images on any graphics card with any given drivers, but under normal operation, if your system is not running into resource problems, you wouldn't notice it a great deal. Whether or not you're using the standard XP themes should have no affect on this unless, again, you're running into resource problems (CPU/RAM/vid limitations).
Other than that, a GeForce4MX is NOT a GeForce4 by any stretch of the imagination except in name, it's just a faster GeForce2MX, which is just a memory-restricted GeForce2GTS. The video card still is not the problem there, as I'm running a TNT2 Ultra, GeForce2 GTS (64MB), and ATI Rage Ultra, all of which rarely display any problems at all, and the TNT2 and GeForce2 are probably running the same driver versions. I also tend to run far more programs at once than are visibly running in those shots (but hey, if you really want to see this on your own system, find an app that kills your CPU and/or RAM usage and then move a window around in front of it).