It has passed quite some time since my last blog post about optimizing KWin’s performance, so I felt the need to write a new one In the meantime KDE SC 4.8 including KWin 4.8 got released with all the features I had described in that blog post, but there are already new optimizations that have landed in the kde-workspace git repository, which I just want to explain shortly:

• The first thing isn’t even new, it is already part of KWin 4.8 It is a window property called _NET_WM_OPAQUE_REGION that allows an application with a translucent window to give the window manager a hint which parts of a window are still opaque. Hence KWin has more room for optimizations. It is part of the ewmh spec and I hope that more applications/styles will adopt it. So far the only style, that I’m aware of, which is using this feature is oxygen-transparent.
• I ported the TaskbarThumbnail, SlidingPopups and WobblyWindows effects to the faster code path that uses paintSimpleScreen. This was a long overdue step, which I really would like to have had in 4.8, but it needed some nontrivial changes to paintSimpleScreen. The actual painting is now done only in one pass instead of two, such that more window-transforming effects can be ported to utilize this function.
• In the spirit of optimizing paintSimpleScreen I also tried to cut down the number of all OpenGL calls. E.g. now KWin does no longer emit a single OpenGL call if the damaged part of the window is fully occluded. To achieve this I used apitrace, which by the way really rocks.
• These days there has finally been added faster repaint support for move/resize events in combination with oxygen-transparent. Before this patch KWin always had to invalidate the blur texture cache of a window if it overlapped with the area of a moving window, although the blurry window might have been below the moving one, which is usually the case. For several blurry windows stacked on top of each other, this meant that moving a window could considerably slow down KWin. At the moment I’m working on porting several window-transforming effects (e.g. WobblyWindows) to use this new and faster method.

That’s it for now For all the other cool new features in KWin I may refer you to Martin’s blog.