No, we are not supported by NVIDIA. It is just that NVIDIA did a lot to improve the situation with KDE4, unlike developers at AMD, who probably did nothing.

You could try disabling "Blur" effect, change compositing settings (direct rendering? texture filter? OpenGL vs. XRender?) and see if it makes any difference.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I tried everything. I'm a bit upset here, that's why I didn't give as many details. Anyway, I even totally disabled KDE effects. It feels totally slow and unusable. It will only be a bit acceptable with ATI open source drivers. Even yet it will make a lot of distortions on the GUI once in a while. I'm sorry for the bad English, I'm Brazilian.

I am using a HD 4350 with the proprietary AMD driver at a resultion of 1920x1080 + 1280x1024 (dual screen) and it is in fact faster than my more powerfull NVIDIA 9600M which I used with a smaller resultion.

If there were performance problems I would fix them. But there are none. At least not when indirect rendering is used. With direct rendering fglrx is unusable and therefore we default to indirect rendering and the user has to explicitly set an environment variable to get direct rendering.

For a HD 3xxx the free drivers should be in a "usable" state, so I recommend to give them a try.

The problems you are experiencing cannot be due to "we optimise for NVIDIA" and have to be triggered by something else, e.g. broken apps causing repaints. But that is nothing for this bug tracker, but for forum.kde.org.

Hey Martin. That's good you mentioned the "indirect rendering" option because it really makes things better. But, did you know that it causes the GUI to have lots of artifacts? Yes, some menus, popups, buttons and many other parts of the KDE GUI will be black. Minimizing and maximizing windows have a 1 to 2 seconds delay and so on. It's unusable. I wouldn't be posting this bug report if I hadn't tried every possible solution for this. You, like every one in the linux forums around the web, underestimate those with problems you don't experience yourselves. That is really good to know you 4xxx card works great! Congratulations! Now, what about me? There is nothing wrong with my hardware. My card is gorgeous with Windows and I've never been through a problem resambling to this with that OS. When it comes to Linux + KDE, everything is horrible. And, please, note that Gnome JUST works with Compiz, ok? It's a kwin compatibility issue that it's very easy to notice that KDE people want to say it's a ATI folks business and vice versa. I'm sick of googling it. And don't change the status of this to resolved because IT ISN'T RESOLVED! This is disrespect to my word. You KDE developers, get a 38xx card and make your tests. It WON'T work! Currently what made me report this bug is Kubuntu 10.10. I've tested Fedora, OpenSuse, Madriva and all of them have the same problem with the propietary drivers under KDE 4. Remember: that problem DOESN'T exist on Gnome or KDE 3. Google it and you'll find plenty of unsatisfied people out there. Bye

a) this is no usefull bug report, but a rant - grow up and try again.

b) the status was _not_ "solved" but "resolve: invalid" - that's a difference. and given the bug title , it's been a very accurate status as well and will remain this unless a real problem has been identified to put in there instead.

c) to bisect performance issues, you'll have to structurize and analyze:
- name you driver version
- specify whether or no the performance is bad even without compositing (suspend with shift+alt+f12) since the two sentences in comment #2 are ambigious
- same goes for the appearance of black elements and - aside - windows
- watch the general cpu load ("top") and try to identify processes with high cpu load
- if it's only slow with compositing enabled, use the "show paint" effect to monitor repaints (the X11 -> OpenGL transition is usually the expensive part)

d) learn to use paragraphs, i'm not gonna read through a mess block again - you probably won't have to SHOUT to stress items then either.

I think you are not getting it Thomas... did you really spend time on reading things that were said here?

I guess it's pretty clear that I've tried to disable compositing (read effects) and it didn't solve the problem. Kwin is still there!

The processes with high CPU load at times are X.Org and Kwin.

The drivers as I've said, again you don't read, are any, ok? Is it clear now? Any drivers will be slow with KDE 4. Currently the only propietary drivers for Kubuntu 10.10 are 8.78.30, you should know, by the way. I remember I said I've tested other distros, drivers 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 were used.

Can you google? If so, look for ATI propietary drivers and kwin and you'll find plenty of information about that.

I just wanted to try to make someone actually KNOW there is a problem, but, as expected and as seen in uncountable forums, Linux people are prepotend and arrogant, no one will ever fix the problem. That's why no one in Brazil at least will keep Linux for more than a week. A shame because it's a great operating system and I love it.

Just to close this:

A) ANY ATI drivers will conflict with kwin, at least on HD 38xx series of cards;
B) Kwin is too slow no matter whether effects (compositing) are used or not;
C) Free drivers are not that slow, but, honestly, I'd rather not have bought my $260 card and keep with my onboard VGA which, at least, doesn't have artifacts at all on the GUI and performs pretty much the same;
D) This thin IS a KDE bug since the same drivers, read ANY drivers, work with any other compositing system or graphical environment, like Gnome and Compiz;
E) I'm not interested on dealing with people like you whom are mostly concerned about complaining about formality rather than being useful for something like trying to help those who by free will are coming to Linux.

Just one more thing: did you know that many websites do not allow people to use paragraphs? We're kind of trained for that. Anyway, that's not really a problem unless you wanna be starting some fight here - which is pathetic. AND, this precarious text input doesn't have any tool for highlighting whatever has got to be highlighted due to people's misreadings.

Good luck for you and your buggy software and lack of concern about "ordinary" people. Let Linux always be for the niche of lucky guys who are geniuses on Information Technology.

Farewell!

(In reply to comment #6)
> I think you are not getting it Thomas... did you really spend time on reading
> things that were said here?
No i just hang in. Please watch your tone.

> I guess it's pretty clear that I've tried to disable compositing (read effects)
> and it didn't solve the problem. Kwin is still there!
Believe it or not, comment #2 is ambigious in
a) the term "effects" (compositing support vs. effect plugins)
b) weak contextual connection in "Anyway, I even totally disabled KDE
effects. It feels totally slow and unusable."

If everything is slow even w/o compositing, it has either nothing to do with kwin at all - or anything, but is in the latter case not related to the fglrx (or any) driver but bug #178269
 
> The processes with high CPU load at times are X.Org and Kwin.
while this speaks against bug #178269
please specify whether this (notably the kwin load) holds only while compositing or in any case.

> The drivers as I've said, again you don't read, are any, ok? Is it clear now?
It's pretty clear that this is bullshit, since the various driver and xorg versions are not "compatible". This is a reason why i asked to name the driver.

> Any drivers will be slow with KDE 4. Currently the only propietary drivers for
> Kubuntu 10.10 are 8.78.30, you should know, by the way.

Why? I'm smart enough to neither use a ATI card nor Ubuntu.
> I just wanted to try to make someone actually KNOW there is a problem, but, as
> expected and as seen in uncountable forums, Linux people are prepotend and
> arrogant, no one will ever fix the problem.
Sorry i thought this was a real bug report, but got actually caught by a troll.

> B) Kwin is too slow no matter whether effects (compositing) are used or not;
try another decoration then
if it's really just kwin & windo manipulations, i'd guess for low performace on allocatiing ARGB drawables - you can just "compiz --replace", btw.

> C) Free drivers are not that slow, but, honestly, I'd rather not have bought my
> $260 card and keep with my onboard VGA which, at least, doesn't have artifacts
> at all on the GUI and performs pretty much the same;
Wait, nvidia: works. intel: works. free ati driver (which one btw? radeon or radeonhd): works. fglrx: works not.
conclusion: fglrx is fine, kwin is broken - yeah, meakes sense.

> D) This thin IS a KDE bug since the same drivers, read ANY drivers, work with
> any other compositing system or graphical environment, like Gnome and Compiz;
saying "any other" and meaning "compiz" is a bold move, since compiz could just be ATIs regression test.

> E) I'm not interested on dealing with people like you whom are mostly concerned
> about complaining about formality rather than being useful for something like
> trying to help those who by free will are coming to Linux.
_you_ blame _me_ about *complaining* and being unuseful and not helping?


OT:
> Just one more thing: did you know that many websites do not allow people to use
> paragraphs?
Name one. Since there's no particular reason for such, i doubt so - you're just usually not allowed to insert html tags.

> AND, this precarious text input doesn't have any tool for highlighting whatever has got
> to be highlighted due to people's misreadings.
*bold* _underline_ /italic/ - we read this in mail clients, you know?