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