With the recently released KDE [1]Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

KWin lead developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post about the improved KDE Plasma desktop performance as of Plasma 6.1, which can be especially noticeable with old integrated graphics hardware such as the common Intel graphics in aging laptops. The biggest improvement to bettering the KDE Plasma desktop graphics performance is thanks to [2]dynamic triple buffering support .

Xaver has a lengthy blog post outlining the improved KDE Plasma / KWin experience on old graphics hardware in Plasma 6.1, but the key takeaway is:

"With all those changes implemented in Plasma 6.1, triple buffering on Wayland

- is only active if KWin predicts rendering to take longer than a refresh cycle

- doesn’t add more latency than necessary even while triple buffering is active, at least as long as render time prediction is decent

- works independently of what GPU you have

In practice, on my desktop PC with a dedicated GPU, triple buffering is effectively never active, and latency is the same as before. On my AMD laptop it’s usually off as well, only kicking in once in a while… But on some older Intel laptops with high resolution screens, it’s always active and I’ve been told it’s like having a brand new laptop - KWin goes from doing stuttery 30-40fps to a solid 60fps.

It’s not just old or slow processors that benefit though, I also tested this on a laptop with an integrated Intel and a dedicated NVidia GPU. With an external display connected to the NVidia GPU, due to some issues in the NVidia driver, multi gpu copies are quite slow, and without triple buffering, the external monitor was limited to 60fps. Triple buffering can’t do magic, but KWin now at least reaches around 100-120fps on that setup, which is likely the best that can be done until the driver issue is resolved and feels a lot smoother already."

Superb! Those wanting to learn more about this improvement to KDE Plasma on old graphics hardware can visit [3]Xaver's blog for all the details.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Plasma+6.1

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Lands-Triple-Buffering

[3] https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/06/25/fixing-kwin-perf-on-old-hardware.html