KDE Plasma 6.7 Enables Overlay Planes For Intel Graphics, More Performance/Efficiency
([KDE] 6 Hours Ago
Plasma 6.7)
- Reference: 0001629730
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-Intel-Overlay
- Source link:
KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It's a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7.
This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to highlight all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes. This week's highlights include:
- Plasma 6.7 now enables overlay planes for Intel graphics hardware/drivers for helping improve performance and conserving energy for some games and apps. This default change is coming due to the Intel Linux drivers running well and not encountering any issues with them. The Intel i915 and Xe graphics drivers is the only setup where overlay planes are being enabled by Plasma 6.7 for release builds. For development builds, it's all GPU drivers but NVIDIA. NVIDIA has "more severe issues" with its current overlay planes handling while AMDGPU has issues on some hardware where there are really slow atomic tests when overlays are used.
- Plasma 6.7 is also improving power efficiency for full-screen windows and effects that don't gain any benefit from Direct Scan-Out.
- Plasma 6.7 will allow the Kicker Application Menu widget to show a "Recent Locations" item.
- With the Plasma 6.6.5 release, dragging a search result for a System Settings page to the desktop with now create a launcher to that page as one would typically expect the behavior to be.
- Plasma 6.6.5 fixes some cases where Plasma would crash at login or where the Plasma Login Manager could crash when connecting/disconnecting multiple monitors.
- KDE Frameworks 6.26 will reduce the amount of blurriness in icons for Qt Quick based apps using "Kirigami.Icon" when using a fractional scaling factor of 150% or less.
More details on the recent KDE Plasma desktop changes via [1]This Week in Plasma .
[1] https://blogs.kde.org/2026/04/25/this-week-in-plasma-fanciness-in-discover-and-more-power-efficiency/
This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to highlight all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes. This week's highlights include:
- Plasma 6.7 now enables overlay planes for Intel graphics hardware/drivers for helping improve performance and conserving energy for some games and apps. This default change is coming due to the Intel Linux drivers running well and not encountering any issues with them. The Intel i915 and Xe graphics drivers is the only setup where overlay planes are being enabled by Plasma 6.7 for release builds. For development builds, it's all GPU drivers but NVIDIA. NVIDIA has "more severe issues" with its current overlay planes handling while AMDGPU has issues on some hardware where there are really slow atomic tests when overlays are used.
- Plasma 6.7 is also improving power efficiency for full-screen windows and effects that don't gain any benefit from Direct Scan-Out.
- Plasma 6.7 will allow the Kicker Application Menu widget to show a "Recent Locations" item.
- With the Plasma 6.6.5 release, dragging a search result for a System Settings page to the desktop with now create a launcher to that page as one would typically expect the behavior to be.
- Plasma 6.6.5 fixes some cases where Plasma would crash at login or where the Plasma Login Manager could crash when connecting/disconnecting multiple monitors.
- KDE Frameworks 6.26 will reduce the amount of blurriness in icons for Qt Quick based apps using "Kirigami.Icon" when using a fractional scaling factor of 150% or less.
More details on the recent KDE Plasma desktop changes via [1]This Week in Plasma .
[1] https://blogs.kde.org/2026/04/25/this-week-in-plasma-fanciness-in-discover-and-more-power-efficiency/