Since updating to Plasma 6.7 on CachyOS, I am experiencing severe performance issues on Intel graphics using the i915 driver. Because 6.7 is still so new, I was unable to find any similar posts regarding this issue. The problem occurs on both my intel machines (i9 13900k and i7 4770) but does not occur on my AMD laptop.
The problem becomes especially apparent when using the zoom desktop feature which I require for accessibility. Zooming/Panning is noticeably choppy. Browsing on Firefox also became very choppy with even some occasional freezes. My monitor is 144hz but it still somewhat laggy on 60hz even if less so.
Temporarily downgrading kwin to 6.6.5 fixes the issue but that is obviously no solution.
Journalctl shows no relevant error logs as far as I can tell.
I’d post a bug report but I have no idea what info I need to include for the developers.
Here are the system infos for one of two affected machines:
Operating System: CachyOS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.27.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.12-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900K
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Intel® Graphics
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
Product Name: MS-7E07
System Version: 2.0
Thanks for your kind reply. The issue lies with the new text/icon scaling in the zoom desktop plugin introduced in commit 0aab86031b in KWin. I realized it affects AMD/Nvidia too but much less so than on Intel graphics (which is really unpleasantly choppy). Luckily one can just disable text sharpening in the settings and that fixes it. I will file a bug report.
Oh wow, that’s really valuable information. Make sure to mention it in the bug report! That being the case, fixing it should be easy, just a matter of turning off the effect completely when the zoom level is 100%.
Hello, after upgrading from 6.6.5 → 6.7.1, the desktop (launcher, windows opening/closing, popups, sys tray…) animations became slow compared to 6.6, only setting animations to “Instant” seems to make using it normal.
Edit: after testing, it seems it’s always that c*rsed blur effect which causes the slow animations for Plasma desktop, disabling it seems to make animations much faster and smooth.
@syslen did you open a bug report about it? If so, can you post the URL here?
@medin since this thread is about the upscaling filter, can you start a new thread about the blur issue? Or better yet, an actionable and well-written bug report!
