In KDE 4.4.4 and 4.5 System Settings under Appearance>Style>Fine Tuning tab there is the following setting for graphic effects. Can someone please explain what it does and how it works because I don't seem to see any difference in the effect the settings have. By default it seems set to low display resolution and high CPU. This seems opposite to what one would expect it to be.


How are the different options meant to be interpreted? For example the two options below seem counter intuitive. Do you take the interpretation literally as in

Low display resolution and high CPU - Does that meant it uses more CPU power for low resolution?
High display resolution and low CPU - Does that mean to reduce CPU power for high resolution?

Or is it meant to be interpreted as priorities?
Low display resolution and high CPU - Keep the priority of low resolution and high cpu i.e. it will reduce the display resolution / effects to free CPU power.
High display resolution and low CPU - Here the display resolution has a high priority over the CPU, i.e. it will force all the resolution / effects to look correct at the expense of using up a lot of CPU power.

It still doesn't make much sense to me which ever way you read it. If it's referring to actual display resolutions / effects, most graphic adapters have their own GPU's so don't really impact the main CPU. Completely confused.

I believe this is referring to different combinations of animations that the Oxygen style can provide. Some of these effects are CPU intensive, others are GPU intensive. Those strings are the same in KDE Trunk, i'll ask the maintainer of that component what they mean.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing what they say.

According to the Oxygen developers, it does not follow those settings, and they find it confusing also.

Assuming something actually uses those settings (I've not noticed any difference whatsoever when I've changed that setting), I've interpreted it as follows.

CPU: The high and very high setting means that the user thinks the computer is fast enough to handle more effects without everything coming to a crawl. Then again, considering the graphic-chips of today the CPU itself shouldn't affect that to a high degree usually. The GPU and/or the driver is more important I would think.

Resolution: I thought that was something along the lines of that some graphical effects may not be all that useful on low-res diplays so it would be a waste of resources rendering those effects if the resolution is low enough. Of course, that opens up another question (if my interpretation is correct): what is considered "low" and what is considered "high" resolution?

Edited to add: so, selecting a low resolution should turn off effects that are not useful on low-res displays even if the cpu is set to high. Set the cpu to low would turn off effects that would otherwise make the computer sluggish. If both are set to low the effects should effectively be turned off. If both are set to high, all effects are on.

Not sure if this makes sense...

So we've verified that the Oxygen theme doesn't make use of the settings. Then do these settings must go deeper than theme level. I've not detected any difference in using the different settings but it's difficult to know what to be looking for.

As already mentioned, they don't make much sense and as virtually all modern graphic cards now have there own GPU taking the load off the cpu what would we need these settings for? Is it some legacy setting left over? And as Krysten2X4B says, what actual values do low, high , very high relate too? It's so vague that it's basically meaningless.

A lot of questions and interpretations. I hope a KDE developer is able to answer this or shed some light on what these settings are trying to achieve.

Not completely sure about this, but I seem to remember the following: at first the thought was to let you configure the animations the Oxygen style uses, much like the Animations tab in oxygen-settings. However this would be too advanced and confusing for the basic user, so this drop-down list was introduced to switch between effects.

I read it as "how high is your resolution" (I guess higher resolution = more resources needed) and "how powerful is your CPU". With that said, I also find it confusing and would rather like a simple "No animations", "Few animations" etc.

Unfortunately, the Oxygen developers don't know what it means, or does or if anything actually uses it. It is likely a legacy element, and can be ignored.

OK thanks.

If someone is still interested on this topic, I can shade some light regarding the resolution part. I noticed on the default theme that if I set up the Low resolution ( and cpu combo) it tinkers with the anti aliasing of the fonts(the render seems to be the same as when koffice2 had the rendering bug a while ago), and what I see is a huge difference on rendering gradients compared to the High resolution setting. Since I have what is called a high resolution ( over 1024x768), with low res enabled, you can clearly see the ellipses with the gradient tone when transitioning from a color to another. You can also see that the plasma menus are drawn a bit chunky and feel that the texture are somewhat wrong ( like when you zoom in on a small pixmap, you can see big squerish pixels). It kind of makes sense to lessen the rendering ops and the memory usage to something simpler, when you are on a netbook with a small screen, because the user won't know the difference either way, but on a bigger screen, this degrades the desktop experience.

I add that you have to relog after changing the settings in order to see the difference.
I don't know much about the cpu part, but I'm guessing that there might be subtle changes or touches that make the desktop experience more enjoyable ( I'm thinking of focus fades on gui items and subtle transitions.)

Thanks for shedding some more light on this setting. So from you're saying, if you use a resolution above 1024x768 then we should set the setting to one of the High Resolution options.

I wonder what is classed as high cpu? Is 1.6Ghz a high cpu these days?

I have found something about the low CPU option.

I have until now only noticed this with the Smooth Tasks widget (a replacement for the normal Task Manager).
In Smooth Tasks when you put the mouse pointer over a task, a menu appears (the preview) with the window's name. If the name is bigger than a certain size, then only a part of it is displayed, and if you put the mouse pointer over the name, then the text starts to move smoothly. But with a Low CPU settings, the traslation is not smooth, it jumps many pixels.

Better an image:



I don't understand how nobody knows exactly what are these options supposed to do. Somebody had put the code there, it would be great to contact that developer so he/she can explain these odd configs, and improve the description in System Settings.

oxygen-settings --author shows:
Oxygen Settings was written by
Hugo Pereira Da Costa

Maybe he can resolve this mystery.

The person mentioned there was the developer I previously contacted.

bcooksley wrote:The person mentioned there was the developer I previously contacted.

Do you mean Hugo Pereira Da Costa?

bcooksley wrote:According to the Oxygen developers, it does not follow those settings, and they find it confusing also.

What do you mean with "it"? Which settings?

I find this weird, because cmcx_linux and me have found some places where the settings take effect. And also, somebody has written the code! How can we know which person was that?

Yes, I was referring to Hugo.

"it" in this case refers to the Oxygen style itself.
I suggest checking using svn blame and a checkout of the source code to see who last changed the lines of code which adds this feature.