KDE4.5 desktop effects problems with nvidia at 1920x1080?

[T6]

i understand your point but for every piece of hardware you will eventually find its limitations, in video cards this happens rather quick, a sad fact of life 

as stated before there are some tricks to force this old video card work faster but at the resolution required(very high) and using desktop effects it is a load that not many new cards can handle well so this is why a hardware upgrade should be considered

as you say linux help you to use older hardware but that doesn't mean that it will do magic with insufficient resources under very heavy load 100% of the time on every condition existent

linux helps you alot but can't do miracles

[littlenoodles]

Thanks ethoms for backing me up.

It's not that I don't think I'll someday want to upgrade my card in order to take advantage of some great new features for which an upgrade is required - that's how I came to buy the card in the first place.  It's that KDE is hurting their cause by introducing a 'need to upgrade' situation as a point release to the much-maligned KDE4 series.  It plays into the notion that every step forward comes with two steps back.  In fact I've read several reviews of KDE4.5 this week that essentially say just that - mostly because of this regression in the video system (it's not just me).  KDE has flagged at least part of the regression as a bug (misinterpreting the bogus output of video drivers regarding the capabilities of the cards).  PCLOS has  a KDE4 update now in the repositories, so maybe I'm about to get my fix (though the last KDE4 update didn't fix it).

In any case, I'm not nuts about the tendency to blame the messenger for pointing out problems.  I'm not blindly dissing KDE or PCLOS.  And while some of you may think 'upgrade your hardware' is the appropriate answer (and in some cases it may be), leaping to that conclusion ought to be the last resort.  The card you're dismissing may be 'old', but it works fine at the highest resolution under KDE4.4 and still works fine under 4.5 with Compiz substituted for kwin.  Effects and all.  At some point there needs to be a better rationale for breaking a working video system than somebody scratching their itch.  KDE is a largely Nokia funded enterprise these days, and I think they mostly get the importance of maintaining compatibility across point releases.  Maybe not in keeping with the 'linux ethos', but probably a better path toward widespread acceptance.

[littlenoodles]

Calling T6.  No miracles required.  Just upgraded to KDE5.4.1, and the problem's fixed.  So it was either a KDE bug or some KDE dev jumping the gun on hardware requirements.  In any case, I guess it pays to complain.  I'm back to kwin with full effects at 1920x1200.

But just to continue as a kermudgen for a sec.  You're still implying that supporting this card for window manager 3D effects takes a 'miracle'.  Obviously it doesn't.  Compiz did it.  And now KDE4.5.1 does too.  I'm sure Mac OS/X had spiffy 3D effects on equal or lesser hardware 5 years ago.  So why do you continue to imply that my perfectly okay video card would take a miracle to support by a 'modern' system?  It's obvious that you have a bias toward buying a new computer every 2-3 years, and I'd hate to think that mindset was driving the whole Linux enterprise.  It's Windows that requires a new computer for every OS upgrade.  Linux is supposed to fix that.  And PCLOS really does fix it.

Then again, maybe we need our own hardware update treadmill in order to get the OEM's interested in supporting Linux.  Does anybody out there think that'd actually work... 

[tj_fredo]

quote form Martin Graessling kwin developer:

... So for example the blur effect requires GLSL with fragment shaders and frambebuffer objects.

maybe here is the culprit 

And then I start to think about it and realize: yes we are. Compiz does not yet use GLSL (Compiz’s Blur effect is written in GPU assembler. KWin blur also has an assembler part which is a fallback in case the driver does not claim support for GLSL), so we are probably the first ones to use these driver capabilities in a real world application. Now why are we using something that new? Because it is quite old: this is OpenGL 2 we are speaking about, a standard specified in 2004!

FX series technical specs:
API SUPPORT
• Complete DirectX support, including
DirectX 9.0 and lower
• OpenGL 1.5 and lower support
COMPATIBILIT Y
• NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.5 API
with NVIDIA extensions, on all Linux and
Windows operating systems
• WHQL-certified for Windows XP, Windows Me,
Windows 2000
• Complete Linux XFree86 drivers

also about resolution.
DISPLAY PIPELINE WITH FULL NVIEW
CAPABILITIES
• Dual RAMDACs (up to 400 MHz) for display
resolutions up to and including
2048x1536@85Hz
• Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support
resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need
for panning with built-in Macrovision copy
protection
• DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to
1920x1080i resolutions
• DVI support for compatibility with next-
generation flat panel displays with
resolutions up to and including 1600x1200

[T6]

"But just to continue as a kermudgen for a sec.  You're still implying that supporting this card for window manager 3D effects takes a 'miracle'.  Obviously it doesn't"

good for you