KDE Plasma 6.8 To Enjoy Huge Performance Gains For Multi-GPU/eGPU Performance

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling.

Plasma 6.8 is significantly improving the performance for external GPU setups / multi-GPU use on Linux. Xaver Hugl implemented DMA-BUF v6 support for KWin and to manage multi-GPU copies directly by KWin. KWin is able to do direct scan-out and thus with KWin managing copies explicitly, in some cases it can use the original buffer for direct scan-out and actually avoid making any copies.

Xaver in his testing went from 40 FPS to 120 FPS with his external GPU testing with this latest KWin code and Mesa. Or when testing with Cyberpunk 2077, from 27 to 50 FPS:

Xaver blogged more about this improved external/multi-GPU handling for KDE Plasma 6.8 with KWin via this blog post.

Meanwhile, Plasma 6.8 with its System Settings Display Configuration page will now allow moving screens pixel-by-pixel with arrow keys for the layout editing mode.

KDE Frameworks 6.29 has also fixed a performance issue that could make Plasma freeze when it sent a notification containing many emojis.

Other interesting, smaller changes to KDE Plasma this week can be found via the usual Saturday update in This Week in Plasma.