I currently use a laptop with the Intel GM965 which has been a disaster running kde 4.4 ( and 5 RC1) is chubby performance wise especially when i have lots of windows open. I am in the market for a new laptop and I would need advise on which graphic card works best with kwin. here are my options

Intel HD
This seems to be the latest card from intel chips with the core i5- i7 chipset. most of the core i7 laptop I want to get come with this graphic card. I would appreciate if anyone could enlighten me on the state of this card on Linux ( Kwin in particular) and how well it is supported

ATI Cards I am not informed about ATI cards or their models. I just know that it is supported on linux by a free open source driver and a proprietary driver. Would anyone recommend a laptop with ATI cards? I am looking to get recent laptops with DDR3 and Intel Core i5 which means it would likely ship with the latest ATI cards. I would appreciate if anyone can share their experience with the more recent ATI cards on linux.

Nvidia Card The first ( and last) time i used a laptop with Nvida card was the Geforce 8400 GT card. Performance under compiz ( this was 2007 ) with kde 3.5 was very poor with their proprietary driver. 2D rendering was slow and very chubby. I never got a Nvidia card ever since. Has the situation improved? I would very much love to have experiences with the recent Nvidia cards too

I am just here trying to look before I leap so that I can get the best kde performance from my new pc. I would really appreciate in puts

Wow Guess I must have done somthing wrong. I asked this same question on the kwin IRC and was met with silence. Often time we blame users for buying hardware not friendly to freesoftware and not doing their research. So when KDE user decide to do the right thing and ask on the Kde forum (and IRC) what graphic card could be recommended for the best experience with KDE. He is met with Silence. That is just awesome :/

Heck why do I even care. Its High time I quit this childish attachment to software cause of its licensing. Don't bother replying I would just get any cool system and use what works best on it Windows, gnome or kde.

You did nothing wrong. This topic or similar has been discussed several times. Since you add nothing to the discussion, probably nobody bothered to answer. You should had researched a bit instead of asking for information from the beginning.

Right now, KWin works well almost everywhere, except with a few, probably, unfortunate setups.

I'll tell you what I know: nVidia. Fact: nVidia propietary drivers are buggy (like most software), and KWin uncovers many driver bugs. So, I recommend you to not use the most bleeding edge driver if you have a working setup.

My working setup: nVidia GeForce 7300 (G72) based card. With 190.42 propietary driver everything works fast. There is no slowness at moving, resizing windows. Blur slows down things a little so, I disable it.

+1 on the Nvidia - it has the best driver support for Linux (proprietary drivers) I'm happily using the 256 series

Another advantage is that various video players (vlc, mplayer - depending on versions and packaging) can offload processing on to the gpu using the vdpau api (currently don't believe the others can). And at some point browsers will also be offloading to the gpu (Google I.E. 9 preview)

If you want benchmarks and a place to research go here http://www.phoronix.com/

I am a little bit surprised by the attitude in this thread. Of course I could help in this thread but I decided not to answer as I don't want to be responsible for a bad user experience. Hardly anybody has hardware from all three vendors - e.g. I have never ever had an Intel GPU. So I cannot say anything about the card.

Neverhteless I have enough experience to know which drivers suck and which really suck. Let's make it short: they all suck, some suck more, some less. Now it's just the question what you really want. Do you want a good GPU with bad drivers and no hope for improvement or a not quite so good GPU with bad drivers and the hope for improvement in one or two years?

And for those saying NVIDIA is good: we see quite some serious problems in the kwin bug reports with the latest driver releases.

card:
07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G86 [GeForce 8500 GT] (rev a1)

driver:
Name : nvidia
Version : 256.35-1

performance:
no probs I have encountered

Hardware support is an extremely vague subject. Performance could depend on your hardware, the drivers, the version of the drivers your distribution uses, the distribution itself or bugs in KWin.

Intel GPUs tend to work very well under Linux, as Intel have released open-source drivers that now come bundled with Linux. Additionally, Ubuntu tends to distribute good-quality nVidia drivers in it's hardware detection tool, and they usually work well with modern nVidia cards.

Also, learn to be patient. We can't answer everyone's questions everywhere all the time.

Well, my two cents worth:

My current workstation uses Intel graphics (according to lspci "Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 10)"). No performance beast by any means but decent enough if you're a bit conservative about what effects you turn on (hint: avoid KDE 4.5's blur effect...)

My previous one used a Nvidia 7300 GS card, and I used the 195.something driver on, if I remember correctly, up to KDE 4.3. The only serious problem I noticed at that time was the garbled systray icons (in KDE 4.2 I think) but that has since been rectified. It had ceased to be a problem when that computer decided to commit suicide at any rate. I never noticed any problems speed-wise though.

I have no experience with (semi)-current ATI cards so I can't help you there. Composite worked fine for me on an older ATI-radeon mobile GPU though. Well, when I say "fine" I mean that it was easily enabled and worked but worked slowly. However, that laptop was rather limited memory-wise so I'm not sure how much of the blame should be lain at the driver or kwin.

In all cases I used kwin rather than compiz.

google01103 wrote:+1 on the Nvidia - it has the best driver support for Linux (proprietary drivers) I'm happily using the 256 series

Another advantage is that various video players (vlc, mplayer - depending on versions and packaging) can offload processing on to the gpu using the vdpau api (currently don't believe the others can). And at some point browsers will also be offloading to the gpu (Google I.E. 9 preview)

If you want benchmarks and a place to research go here http://www.phoronix.com/

I don't think this is true. A few weeks ago I bought a new PC with AMD/ATI graphics. And I discovered that their binary driver even supports the newest xrandr. It is a shame nvidia don't do this. I really hate it because I do not want to start there own tool every time I plug a screen into my laptop.

I think that the ati drivers really had improved the last years and should be accepted now. The last time before I bought the new PC was when the radeon 9600 was new. At this time I would accept the statement that nvidia are the best for linux but not at the moment. Nvidia really has work to do if they don't want to get behind the others on linux.

I have used Linux exclusively for about 4 years and have tried to migrate to KDE about 5 times over that time. Unfortunately, even with my newer (old) graphics card: Nvidia 6200, KDE is extremely laggy. Gnome, on the other hand, "just works" and is extremely snappy but works so well it has become boring. I really like the look and functionality of KDE better but just cannot suffer the lag... which is extremely prominent with KWIN activated. I either need a new computer or better GPU driver and cannot justify a new computer when Gnome works flawlessly. Unfortunately this issue is at the expense of KDE usership.

teseg - turn off the blur effect and try using the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers (not the Noveau)

Does Gnome have desktop effects? Or do they use Compiz?

So get this one... turns out it was not KWIN or nvidia causing lag. I just reinstalled opensuse kde to see if it was "blur" causing issues. As it turns out I was having an issue with my update applet that was using all my cpu power causing a lag response. Once I got my update applet to stop trying to update 24/7, my system has become nearly as snappy as gnome. Thanks for the prompt to get me to try things again which ultimately uncovered and resolved a separate issue.