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Currently when your computer does not have enough CPU or GPU power to handle desktop effects (compositing) it just turns them off. I don't think this is a good approach because KDE really does not look anywhere near as good with compositing off, and many plasma themes look downright terrible. I think a better approach would be for different effects to be rated by the developers as having a certain importance and a certain cost. So keeping your taskbar and application launcher transparent would be important, as would animated showing and hiding of the panel and dimming for administrative mode. On the other hand desktop snow, magic lamp, and desktop cube would not be.

So kwin should look at your performance and determine, given your current issues, which plasmoids it can afford to keep and which it can't, and then temporarily disable those that it can't. It could also replace some with lower-cost alternatives, like replace the shift-switcher or cover-switcher with the composited box switcher. It could also automatically scale the texture quality and the texture filter, change whether invisible window thumbnails are maintained, etc.

Right now I have to make an educated guess of what my video card can handle. First I have to turn desktop effects on, hope this doesn't slow things down too much while I go and turn off effects I don't want or can't use. I have an Intel 945GM, which is not a very powerful card, having to decide which ones are useable is time consuming at best and risks crashing X in the meantime. Some users would probably turn off desktop effects rather than go through the hassle of selecting them one by one.

Having some sort of preset lists, preferably based on performance levels, would be great.

Angel Blue01 wrote:Right now I have to make an educated guess of what my video card can handle. First I have to turn desktop effects on, hope this doesn't slow things down too much while I go and turn off effects I don't want or can't use. I have an Intel 945GM, which is not a very powerful card, having to decide which ones are useable is time consuming at best and risks crashing X in the meantime. Some users would probably turn off desktop effects rather than go through the hassle of selecting them one by one.

Having some sort of preset lists, preferably based on performance levels, would be great.

That is a good idea as well, but this idea is a more dynamic thing, detecting if your computer is running too slowly at the moment and turning off only those effects that are not important and can help boost performance back to acceptable levels.

Therefore we have to know which effects are expensieve and which not. And we don't know that as it very much depends on what a given hardware supports and what not. The only effect we know for sure to be very expensive is the snow effect.