OSNews

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.