hi,

I am using 12.1 with KDE 3.5.9. The annoyance is when i move any window with my mouse the window isn't being repainted quickly enough so you get 'trail' effect from the windows old location to the new one for about 2-3 seconds.

I have a Radeon X1900XTX, using the ATi peripheral driver and direct rendering is working.

Any suggestions as to why this might be happening?


thanks,

Ed

Just an idea, did you try disable Composite extension in xorg.conf ?
Or maybe add video driver option in xorg.conf, but I don't know, I haven't any ATI card

There are some settings in the KDE Control Center that might cause what you describe. Look in the Desktop section, then Window Behavior, then the Moving tab.

Also consider temporarily changing the video driver. For example, the vesa driver.

Ironically, turning composite off can actually make things worse. When a window is moved, the window manager will send a message to the application to tell it to redraw it's contents. For window managers that do opaque moves, they have to ask the application to redraw itself every step along the way. Depending on the application this can be quite costly. This is why some of the older window managers don't show the contents of the window during the move, and only ask the application to redraw when the move is completed.

In a compositing window manager, all the windows are drawn off-screen and then composited into place on the visible screen. The applications are not asked to redraw themselves as the windows are all bitmapped in video ram. I believe they're normally stored as textures but I'm starting to get out of my depth here so I'll stop at that.


I can't offer any advice on ATI cards either as I've never owned one.

Well I unchecked "Display content in moving windows" Window Behavior > Moving, which stops the redrawing issue; I think I can live without seeing the windows contents while being dragged!

thanks for you input guys