Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Today the 
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Member since:2007-02-17
Hey Thom, you couldn't ask for better service than that!
A personal offer direct to you from the author of kwin.
Wow.
Member since:2005-06-29
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Member since:2007-06-02
Member since:2007-02-17
Maybe the latest fixes in KDE:
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.7.3.php
... and in the Xorg driver for ATI GPUs
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMDM
... might help also. Good luck.
Member since:2010-04-09
Why do we have to "fine tune" KWin to make it work efficiently? Why can't KWin just auto fine-tune itself to the hardware where it runs? This seems like a huge step backwards in time. This is the kind of thing the OS should do, not the user.
Excuse me but KDE' Solid looks like crap if it can't do such a basic thing like this automatically. It was hyped too much and this is the best we can do? Seriously? Why do we have Solid/upower/udev/u* then for?
I understand we have to configure things sometimes, but this is something the user shouldn't care or notice, it should just work.
This is the reason why some people prefer to use Windows or OSX, it just works, why can't we do something better?
Mod me down all you want, but that won't change anything, and this just proves how lame our current technology is.
I can't wait until KDE moves to Wayland, at least that's good news, it's not 1984 anymore.
Edited 2011-11-03 14:03 UTC
Member since:2011-04-07
Well that is a valid question.
First of all KWin tries really hard to not require manual adjustments. It detects the hardware generation (e.g. R500) and disables features not supported or badly supported by the known hardware.
But it is only on generation. We cannot take into account the differences between various models of the same generation.
Now hardware detection is just one thing. There is much more. The performance depends on so many factors, like screen size, number of open windows, what windows are used (e.g. lots of Flash) and that also changes at runtime. Getting this right would require to play Big Brother and that is something we do not want to.
Last but not least the value of performance is rather subjective. One user might think an animation is completely fluid while others think it is slow (we can see that kind of thinking in threads like this: just count how often someone claims it's slow, while other claim it is fast). For some users it is acceptable that for better looks the performance decreases (think of Blur or Lanczos filter), other users don't care about it, they only want everything perfectly snappy.
So there is just no perfect setup which works for everyone. We provide a setup which is perfect for hopefully most users and provide the possibility to finetune the settings to the custom situations of personal taste and where our well-elaborated hardware detection is not good enough.
Member since:
2011-04-07
Hey Thom,
reading your post it seems like you have some configuration issues with your KWin installation. I can offer you to help finding the perfect settings, so that also you get to the point where KWin works for you at least as fast as any other OpenGL compositor. If KWin runs smoothly on Tegra (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-setgsIfY) it has to work on your system, too :-)
Feel free to send me a mail with your system specs (glxinfo, which effects enabled, all compositing related settings, which Qt graphicssystem) and I will provide you a recommendation tailored for your GPU.
There is just one thing: if you do not yet use at least KWin 4.7.2 update ASAP and test whether there is still a need for fine tuning.
Kind Regards
Martin Gräßlin
KWin Maintainer