fglrx and KDE

[Antonio Augusto (Mancha)]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:04, Wolfgang Jeltsch
<4cqncnl7 at acme.softbase.org> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 7. Mai 2009 15:53 schrieb Antonio Augusto (Mancha):
>> I've an RS482 (Radeon XPress 200M),
>
> Hah, probably the same thing, I have. :-)
>
>> and with Jaunty everything works fine with KDE 4.2 and Jaunty.
>> I've effects anabled and I see no slowdown at all (just some increase
>> in memory usage, but this is expected).
>
> How much video RAM do you have?

128Mb shared.
My system has a total of 2Gb, so only about 1,8 is available to the
system (the rest being used by the video card).
Whats your spec?

>
>> Also, I've nothing set on my xorg.conf, Xorg automatically detects the
>> optmial settings for me :)
>
> I have now the following in xorg.conf:
>
>        Option  "AccelMethod" "XAA"
>        Option  "EnablePageFlip" "true"
>        Option  "TripleBuffer" "true"
>
> In addition, I have set “Keep window thumbnails” to “Always” in System
> Settings. It seems as if desktop effects are much more smooth now.
>
> However, there is an interesting effect: If some “animation” is not so smooth
> and I exactly repeat it then it is much smoother the second time. An example:
> I move the mouse into the top left corner. An overview of all windows
> appears. I click on some window. The window moves into the foreground but not
> smoothly. I move the mouse to the top left corner a second time and click on
> the same window. Now, the animation is smooth. If I had clicked on a
> different window, it wouldn’t have been smooth.
>
> Has anyone an idea why this is? Does KWin or some other component cache
> animations?

Probably it has some caching of the "known" images, so it doesn't have
to re-render the image all the time.
I don't know why, but I've always supposed that “Keep window
thumbnails” to “Always”  would slow things down on not-so-high-end
systems. For what I know, you are telling KWin to keep a cache of all
windows you have open. This will speed things up if you have enough
memory, if you don't its a waste (for what i know). Then again, I
dunno what can be considered "enough memory" for Kwin :)

>
>> Also, the page you have been pointed too might be a little outdated,
>> to see all the current supported options take a look at the manual
>> page of radeon (man radeon).
>
> Okay, I’ll have a look. However, the man page won’t tell me the undocumented
> options. ;-)
>
>> Hope this helps.
>
> Thank you for your answer.

my pleasure.

>
> Best wishes,
> Wolfgang
>

Cheers.