Created attachment 183483 [details] test widget to reproduce the bug SUMMARY When a widget that is constantly animating is placed on the Desktop, it uses more GPU compared to when placing the same widget inside a Panel STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Download the attached widget and install it 2. Place the widget in the panel and desktop 3. Use a software capable of monitoring the usage of the GPU used for rendering KWin/Plasmashell, refer to the output of `qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.supportInformation | grep -i '^opengl'` 4. Click on the test widget to toggle the BusyIndicator 5. Compare the GPU usage of each widget animating, one at a time OBSERVED RESULT When the desktop widget is animating the GPU usage is higher compared the usage of the same widget placed in the Panel EXPECTED RESULT Desktop widget should exhibit roughly the same GPU usage on both desktop and panel SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.80 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0 Qt Version: 6.9.1 Kernel Version: 6.15.7-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 12 × Intel® Core™ i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION This was initially reported in a audio visualizer widget https://github.com/luisbocanegra/kurve/issues/40 and upon investigation it appears to affect any QML type displayed on the desktop widget as long as it is updating fast enough
>When a desktop widget is animating the GPU usage is higher than the same widget placed in a Panel(edit) When it's on the desktop, it has to re-render the desktop which is bigger than a panel and the entire wallpaper. Performance is something we're always improving, but I don't think this ticket helps narrow that down.