KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

[Rapax]

So I finally upgraded from 8.04 yesterday and everything seems to be working fine. Fine, but slowly that is.
KDE 4 is almost painfully pretty to look at, and it seems to cover most of the bases as far as functions are concerned, but it does seem to be running very slugishly.
For example, if I right click on an icon in a folderview plasmoid, it takes roughly half a second for the shaded out rectangle of the context menu to appear, and then at least as long again for it to show the entries. Same applies to the Application Launcher Menu, or the Options bars on the sides of the plasmoids. Everything takes...just...that...bit...longer.

I running a dual AMD64 machine, with 4GB Ram and an 8600 GT NVidia card (my main suspect). I've updated to the most current drivers, which I hear are supposedly fixed now (not so?).
I've tried turning off almost all desktop effects, to no avail, and switching from OpenGL to XRender makes it even worse.

Any suggestions?

[Rapax]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

Update: I just installed the 4.2 nightly builds, and the problem is more or less gone. I've got some other bugs, but those are to expected (couldn't get out of desktop cube once ).
And unrelated to the OP, I must say, 4.2 is looking mighty fine.

[dibl]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

I agree -- the GF8600 is not the most muscular graphics chip to run KDE 4 on, with Compiz. It's not bad on my 9600GT, but I am looking at the 260s with green eyes.

[conholster]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

I agree -- the GF8600 is not the most muscular graphics chip to run KDE 4 on, with Compiz. It's not bad on my 9600GT, but I am looking at the 260s with green eyes.

I disagree Almost any Geforce card has enough power to run KDE4 or Compiz. Sometime back, the nvidia drivers or something in KDE4 did cause the behaviour the OP posted.

I've tried Both KDE4 and compiz on a Intel Atom motherboard+cpu and both ran really well.

[Rapax]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

Interesting, so I'll just keep updating drivers, or wait for 4.2 to be released in final.

About that Atom board and CPU: do you think KDE4 might run passably well on an Aspire One (1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM)? I'm currently running XFCE and compiz, which are both running vey smoothly.

[dibl]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

I disagree Almost any Geforce card has enough power to run KDE4 or Compiz.

Ooops, sorry, I was not clear. I did not mean to say the GF 8600 could not run KDE4 -- it certainly can.

What I meant was, with KDE4 running, load up Compiz, Emerald, start music playing on Amarok, and then run Firefox and open a page with Flash, and then open htop and observe that your system is pretty well on its knees, due mainly to Xorg, with firefox, compiz.real, plasma, and npviewer close behind. The more capable your graphics card (GPU speed, memory, and stream processors), the less your CPU will be taxed to keep the video stuff moving.

[conholster]

Re: KDE 4.1 very slow? I'm I doing it wrong, or is my machine not up to it?

About that Atom board and CPU: do you think KDE4 might run passably well on an Aspire One (1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM)? I'm currently running XFCE and compiz, which are both running vey smoothly.

Yea I think so.

woops, sorry dibl