KDE4 and NVidia 8300GS problems [Solved]

Question

Symptons:
Screen Tearing
Desktop Effects not completely working
What changed:
Suddenly, seems all of the Desktop Effects started working proplerly.
What I did:
hwd -xa
nvidia-xconfig
Edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf
     Changed Depth from 16 to 24
     Added my "1680x1050" to Mode lines
http://pastebin.com/f620a77c7
Systems Settings, Desktop:
     Enable Desktop Effects checked
     Advanced Options Button:
          Compositing Type: OpenGL
          OpenGL mode: Texture From Pixmap
          Texture filter: Bilinear
          Direct rendering checked
          Use VSync unchecked
     All Effects Tab:
          Items checked are as follows:
          Track Mouse
          Zoom
          Dialog Parent
          Login
          Logout
          Minimize Animation
          Present Windows
          Scale In
          Shadow
          Desktop Grid
          Flip Switch
          Note: these are different from the defaults
My only guess is that turning off the Fade effect allowed other effects to start working properly.  Weird thing is I didn't manually select Track Mouse or Zoom.
It might be possible that I clicked things in just the right order this time. 
Items that work now that used not to:
Explosion
Fall Apart
Snow
Wobbly Windows
Flip Switch
NVidia drivers installed:
dave@dellazoid ~  $  yaourt -Ss nvidia | grep installed
extra/nvidia 173.14.12-1 [installed]
extra/nvidia-utils 173.14.12-1 [installed]
extra/nvclock 0.8b3-2 [installed]
See the results here:
http://webpages.charter.net/leutzdave/M … Switch.jpg
IMPORTANT Additional Note:
Noticed that running a diff on current xorg.conf against old backup copies shows that the change
From:     Depth 16
To:         Depth 24
is the more likely cause of things working now.
At some time long ago, evidently, I redid the xorg configuration and missed that one item.
Last edited by archdave (2008-08-10 07:28:46)

Answer 1

I have an idea that I will be researching around for more information on.
In KDE, I remember that Opengl was used in a setting instead of NVIDIA's X Rendering (or was it direct rendering...).
With my minor knowledge of graphics cards and rendering, I came up with this:
Opengl's memory management was used in KDE, so it explains how my computer was able to handle both compositing and graphic intensive games. And that X Rendering is not good  at(or has any ability)  managing memory. So I must find a way for NVIDIA to only use Opengl.
Please correct me if I am making the wrong conclusion!
EDIT: Looking at the NVIDIA server settings again, it looks like it already uses Opengl.
Reading more from many forums, it looks like Xfce's compositing uses EXA for rendering confusing the situation just a little more.
Last edited by feet4337 (2011-02-03 23:45:18)