Heya,
This one's throwing me for a loop. "Everybody knows" KDE's bloated & slow, though I've done fairly well with it on my current system (P3 1 Ghz, 512 MB RAM). I originally started out with Enlightenment (no bloat, fast, etc.), and after using KDE for a few months, I really want to go back to it (performance increase, feels better, etc.)

Problem is, if I use Enlightenment instead of KDE, Vendetta stutters. It's most prominent during fighting, and just after the jump sequence (where it shows you exiting from the jump). If I fire up KDE instead, everything works fine. I've shut down all of my epplets, and checked all my background processes... nothing seems out of the ordinary.

Is anybody else running Vendetta with Enlightenment? I really want to track this problem down...

Specs:
P3 1 Ghz
512 MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, Drivers #3.9.0-r1 (should be updating to 3.14.1 overnight)
SB Audigy
Gentoo

It's almost definitely the thingy that takes screenshots of your windows and draws them in your icon box. It takes a partial screenshot every so many milliseconds, and a full one every time you click the mouse.

Yeppers... that looks like it. Called the pager, btw... grabs a screenshot of each desktop (virtual and multiple), shrinks it, and displays it in the appropriate spot. Turn off the snapshots (grabbing that screenshot), and that stuttering looks like it goes away (I played VO for about five minutes, and it didn't show up... gotta play it for longer to make sure). Thanks, a1k0n ;o)

On a side note, it looks like I shot myself in the foot by upgrading to the 3.14.1 version of the ATI drivers... performance went out the door. Had to drop the background quality down from the highest (Excellent?) to High (down two notches) to get my frame rate back to comfortable levels. I'm gonna play around with the internal vs. external AGP driver before I go back, though.

Not wishing to start a Window Manager war but Enlightenment wouldn't exactly be my No.1 choice for performance in any case. It looks cool, but eats vast amounts of memory. If KDE is worse than I had better make a note to never try it...

PS: Window Maker all the way ;-)

Ok, perhaps I should tryout Fluxbox sometime...

Hmm ... actually E was always one of the leaner WM's. (If you disable all that animation/audio stuff).
I ran it on a 266Mhz Celeron with 64Mb RAM and it was quite usable. :D

Only reason I switched to sawfish (now metacity) was that it got less and less comatible with GNOME. meh ...

EDIT:
And to post something on topic. :) It might be possible to change to the priority of the screen grabbing thing if you still want to use it. Or did E run everything in one process?

I've had no complaints with the performance of E yet. For a rough comparison (I know it's not a really useful benchmark, but I haven't put the time & energy into trying to find a different one), I've been using SETI@Home under both E & KDE. With E, I complete about 14.0 - 14.4% of a unit each hour. Under KDE, I'm about 11%. Besides, it looks good, and has all the features I want (without all the stuff that KDE gives me that I don't use).

Anyway, E does run everything in one process. I'm going to see if there's some way I can't send a msg to the pager to stop the screen grabbing... if I can, I'll just throw a script up to stop the grabber, run Vendetta, and start it back up when I'm done with Vendetta.

I gave up on the video drivers... switching to the internal AGP driver didn't help. I just dropped my graphics quality down a bit, and it's running a lot better. *shrug* I can live with it.

I use Blackbox myself, and quit out of the WM before I start any of my games.

-Blackbox has the ability to replace itself (the windowmanager) with a script; i.e, to launch another WM from within Blackbox.. I just call the following script:

<<
LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libGL.so" vendetta
blackbox
>>

in other words, blackbox shuts down, runs vendetta, then re-launches itself after I quit... cool, eh??

What's the point? It's not like bb takes a lot of system resources... I mean if you ran kde I could understand it, but blackbox!? are you running on a pentium 75mhz!?

oh well, ion for the people! <-- my 2 cents worth of wm propaganda

Okay, I admit it... truth is, that was meant to be a funny kinda way to recommend the same solution for theluckyone... and anyone else who likes "chunky" windowmanagers :D

Actually, if I want to get out of Enlightenment, and still run something under X, I log out of E, and drop to the console, then use:
export DISPLAY=:0.0
X & /opt/vendetta/vendetta

Runs it perfectly fine, without being bogged down by a WM. I haven't bothered to slap it in a script yet, since I memorized it easily enough. I tend to use the same trick for Neverwinter Nights.

At least until I upgrade my system in a month or two. Intel's RetailEdge program has this nice P4 3.4 GHz proc & mobo combo right now... once it opens up, I plan on picking one up (assuming the combo's don't go in four hours like they did last year).

'Til then, I'm stuck.