Amine27 wrote:I have 7300 and no problem with KDE4

What screen resolutions do you run? Have you tried running Google Earth? Also, which version of nvidia driver do you use? The latest one is, I guess, 177.80, released a few days back.

The resolution : 1280x768, i don't tried Google Earth yet, Nvidia driver : 169.12

I've got GeForce Go 7300 on my laptop and I have problems with krunner (not redrawing correctly), corruption on the system tray, and the CPU usage seems a bit high with compositing.

I have a Mobility Radeon HD 3470 and I can recommend a ATI card.

It works perfectly.

GeForce 7300
Resolution 2640 x 1024 (2 screens)
No screen corruption

@alec: Disabling GLib loop support should help reducing KWin's cpu usage

I'm making a similar purchasing decision (run KDE4 and dual monitors). I previously had a nvidia card, it lagged badly with KDE4 until I started using the very latest beta drivers. (Not sure if it still holds true, but they released the drivers on their linux forums quite a bit before it'd appear as a beta on their site). All was sweet, until that card recently overheated and died.

So in the mean time, I've been using the integrated ATI of my mobo, and it runs everything fine (Google earth no problem either, it's probably less intensive than KDE itself). The only problem is, it only has a single monitor output

After looking around, I'm going to pick up a (new) passively cooled ATI card on Monday when the store opens. It's only like $30 (USD). My only reason for choosing it over nvidia will be to support the opensource radeonhd project (Of which, I believe ATI is paying the salary of 3 devs). (I don't play games, so to lack of proper 3D acceleration doesn't bother me)

But if you're planning on running proprietary drivers, definitely go with nvidia. ATI's linux stuff is complete trash comparatively.

kap4lin wrote:Hi,
I am looking for a graphics card which is compatible with KDE 4.1.2+....

At ATI x1800 aid bugs lockups and applications. There is a GeForce 8600GT and it works perfectly.

I use a Nvidia 8600m-GT in my laptop. And I was really annoyed by the problems with KDE4 and firefox for months.

Now with the lastest beta driver things are getting better. Performance is OK. But have random weird freezes now and can not suspend to ram (or not awake from it). OK it is beta after all. But I feel like using beta graphic drivers since I i got this laptop (11 months ago).

So, well I am over with closed source graphic drivers. I am not a gamer anyway so a recent Intel or some ATI should work for me too with open drivers.

And an related issue: In 2 years or the like my 8600m will probably only get supported by the legacy driver from Nvidia. And when you look at the current legacy driver it doesn't support the newest XOrg server anymore. So with that cards you are stuck with an old x.

I have 7600GS with drivers 177.80, running on KDE4 SVN and I have problems with tray appearance, krunner and compositing is quite slow comparing with KDE3 + Compiz

With 180.08 I does not improve and additionally there is a bug with fonts in this unstable driver.

I plan to buy a new computer in January and seriously I'm thinking about a possibility to buy some ATI card (I don't like ATI cards) because KDE4 with NVidia is disaster

I have tried all possible combinations of InitialPixmapPlacement and GlyphCache and also setup in xorg.conf and nothing did't impove the situation. But the truth is that with 177.80 drive the situation is better than with older drivers but still not good enough unfortunately

This is an update from my end (I had started the thread!). I took my chances and bought a GeForce 9500GT. There was a good (USD 50) deal at Microcenter (actual price is ~$75, I think). The specs are:

PNY GeForce 9500 GT, PCI Express 2.0, 512MB DDR2, 128-bit, 550 MHz Core clock, 1400 Shader clock, 1000 MHz (effective) Memory Data Rate, 16 GB/sec mem bandwidth, OpenGL 2.1 support.

Side note: PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible with 1.0 and DDR3 cards are much more expensive than DDR2.

Tests/Results:

KDE 3.5.10 : on Kubuntu 8.04.1 with 177.80 driver (from nvidia.com, not from the repository) : Google earth + Dual monitor : no problem at all :thumbs_up:

KDE 4.1.80 (4.2 beta 1) : on Kubuntu 8.10 with 177.80 driver (using the restricted driver setup) : Google Earth + Dual monitor : no apparent problems till now -
- The KDE4 GUI seems pretty responsive, no sluggishness even with the eye candy (compositing) effects on. (love the cover-flow switcher, Desktop cube is quite fancy)
- Consistenly getting 60 fps. With GE running, this jumps anywhere between 30 fps to 55 fps depending on the usage.
- With the "Show FPS" on, CPU was consistenly near 50%
- Without the FPS, but with the Network and CPU monitoring widgets on, CPU was jumping around 10%, which seems a tad bit expensive but not too bad.
- No plasma/widget/panel crashes as yet.

Though I must mention that ksysguard (while graphing) itself was taking a decent amount of CPU. Monitoring with top instead of the ksysguard, reduced CPU to 2%

So, everything looks promising. Kudos to the KDE and Nvidia teams.:thumbs_up: I haven't moved my main partition to Kubuntu 8.10 yet. Hopefully next month when 4.2 comes out.

Thanks to everyone for their valuable inputs. Keep your experiences/opinions coming. This thread might become a useful resource for others.

Thought of updating this thread further... The PNY nvidia 9500 GT overheated and the capacitors blew off in April 09 (after only 6 months of usage). PNY replaced it with a "new" 9500 GT. Since then, I've refrained from using a dual-monitor setup There may be an issue with my motherboard...