Hello ;=)

When i activating the desktop effects i have a long list of them that are disabled, how come ? Is this because of the graphics card ?

What are the requirements to have access to full version of desktop effects ?
(i might buy a nvidia geforce 9500 gt but will it suffice ? )

After years with nvidia graphic cards i now have and AMD HD4850 , i installed the free driver (radeon) and now the non-free one (fglrx_xpic_SUSE114).

i'm with kde 4.7.2 and opensuse 11.4

Thanks

I can't speak for AMD gpu's but can tell you that I've a 9500gt with the latest Nvidia drivers and all seems fine, don't use a lot of effects but none are grayed out. Is a 9500gt that much cheaper than a Nvidia 220 ?

The AMD HD4850 is a pretty recent card and and think it's supposed to be faster than a 9500gt so you shouldn't give up on it quite yet. Might suggest you change the subject of the thread to include AMD/ATI/Radeon and HD4850.

When you installed the non- free did you follow the "preamble" here http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_drivers

Before trying to install the fglrx package it is really recommended to get ride of free radeon driver. On the boot line add : nomodeset blacklist=radeon 3 So you will boot without xorg launched. At that time it is recommended to recreate an initrd without the radeon loaded simply launch as root mkinitrd Then proceed with one of the two method GUI or command line.

and from the troubleshooting page http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_troubleshooting

Enable FGLRX
If you have a Radeon HD 2000 series or higher, your performance will most likely benefit from running the proprietary fglrx driver. If, after rebooting, fglrx doesn't seem to be enabled, try running the aticonfig tool manually.
aticonfig --initial

For Nvidia if you want nouveau driver you need to be careful for new cards are not always ok, and also ther'es a "lovely" bug blocking some pcs with some of them ...
This is why i used nouveau wiki features page and wanted an nv50 family GC, which is older but supposedly better supported by nouveau.

For Amd :
I used radeon t otry its result, but it's even worse, slow display, blinking everywhere... really ugly

For fglrx : i used a very fine script called atiupgrade which does all the work for yu to install , installs requires packages for kernel modules, it takes the ati installer and creates a rpm id needed, then installs it, runs ati config tool ... . Atiupgrade script is really a good tool .

i still do not get why some desktop effects are ruled out, what do they expect ?