Plasma animations are choppy / slow on Meteor Lake Intel Graphics, specifically when using i915 (as far as I can tell)

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I recently started using an Intel machine with a (downclocked because single channel) Arc 8 Core iGPU, I put Fedora KDE on it and I’m running with the latest kernel (Linux 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64), the latest Plasma (KDE Plasma 6.3.5) and the latest Mesa version available on F42 (Mesa 25.0.6), and I’ve started to slowly notice that animations within KDE were either starting to get slower as runtime kept going, or they were slow / choppy from the getgo, as if I were using some sort of extreme powersaver profile? Now I have had issues with i915 with regards to it not pushing my iGPU as much as it could, but I doubt it would have this much trouble with regards to something like Kwin/Plasma. Using the debug fps effect, it usually stays at 60 but when opening menus or apps I sometimes see the framerate drop to 30-40fps and immediately go back up when the animation is done.

Switching over to xe, even though intel declares MTL’s “production ready” driver to be i915 as of writing, I’ve been able to get a lot better performance using xe, with my desktop also being buttery smooth on top of it with rarely any choppiness or slowdown, even on the powersaver power profile (tuned-ppd)

(Though xe should only bring about buffs in vulkan performance thanks to it providing vm-bind… both it and i915 should provide similar OpenGL performance

I’m posting this here instead of bugs.kde.org so I can collect relevant logs and possibly either report this to the mesa gitlab or to the KDE bugzilla.

P.S. I would test GNOME but I’m going to be quite busy in the next month and a half so I can’t really afford to be dualbooting/reinstalling/ruining my FKDE install with a GNOME install ,:v

System deets:
Operating System: Fedora Linux 42
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.14.0
Qt Version: 6.9.0
Kernel Version: 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 22 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 155H
Memory: 15.1 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 21M70024GR
System Version: ThinkPad E14 Gen 6

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Made an account just to say that this solved the same issues I was having running kubuntu 25.04

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Ive found similarly on my 275hx iGPU that XE driver drastically out performs the i915 when running Kwin.

Keep in mind though that using the XE driver on Meteor Lake or Arrow Lake H/HX completely invalidates any bug report you make. If you try to make a bug report to the Intel GPU Driver team theyll tell you to kick rocks and use i915 as your princess is in another castle.

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As far as I’m aware, this is a driver issue. See Intel graphics - ArchWiki.

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it definitely is, the easiest current solution is unfortunately a completely unsupported setup that Intel will almost immediately close any issue you bring up regarding XE and Meteor Lake graphics from the issues ive seen where they pretty much just close it with

“not supported, use i915”

so those using this solution should just be aware youre on your own and there be dragons

ML is an Alchemist GPU so it likely will never be officially supported by the XE driver.

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acutally, i just found some fun tools

@radbirb @APRashedAhmed

if you install intel-gpu-tools

and run this command

sudo intel_gpu_frequency -c min=550

does it help? This helps in my case ubless i go to snap windows to the edges or corners then the frame rate dips for a moment. According to intel_gpu_top the power draw only changes by like 0.2w at minimum for 550mhz and you can try raising the minimum further to see what works