kde 4.1 hardware

[bigmac60]

I loaded kde 4.1 on my computer about a week ago and decided I would
be happier having desktop effects turned off. They worked but not smoothly
and seemed to cause me some interesting problems.

I would like an opinion on what the minimum hardware might be required to
have the desktop effects work well. I currently have a sempron 2800+, 1g
memory and a mx4000 nvidia running restricted drivers. Memory and/or a new
gpu would be the easiest but if its not going to help that much why bother.

Thanks for any info.

bob

[dibl]

Re: kde 4.1 hardware

Rather than give you a list of hardware, I can report that if you can get a glxgears frames-per-second (fps) reading of 400 or more, then you can run Compiz and get decent results.

For the past few years that I've been a Linux user, the conventional wisdom has been "buy Nvidia", but they have fallen down a bit lately, with their Linux drivers. KDE 4 is the principle victim of this trouble:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916

http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA

So, I dunno. My Nvidia EVGA 8800GTS is a marvellous monster of a graphics card, and runs KDE 3.5.9 with Compiz amazingly well, but it is suffering the same sluggishness as others report, with KDE4, due to the issues on those links. My little Asus Eee PC with a crappy Intel GMA945 manages only 350 fps with glxgears (before I overclock it ...), and yet it runs Compiz flawlessly with KDE 3.5.9. I'm not gonna try KDE 4 on that one -- that's just asking for trouble.

So I would say any current technology graphics card with, say, 256MB of graphics memory, should do a fine job for you, and leave the sempron free to run its part of the system.

Just an opinion .... YMMV, of course.

[bigmac60]

Re: kde 4.1 hardware

Quick question. When you say over 400 fps, is that in the window size that first comes up
with glxgears?? Even my meager hardware does better than 400.

Thanks for your reply and any further info.

bob