Re: Scrolling Apps = High CPU Utilization

["M. Kirchhoff" <spam@0ubliette.org>]

Quoting David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>:

> My guess is that you wind up doing the scrolling operation all in
> software with the nv driver, which is why you get that much CPU
> usage.  I'd guess that switching to the (non-free) NVidia driver would
> in fact help you get around this problem.  There's not much you could
> change in the kernel configuration to improve it, I don't think.

Out of curiosity I tried to duplicate the problem on a Windows box at work. 
Turns out that on a 3.2GHz machine with 512MB RAM and a GeForceMX 5200 with 64MB
vRAM running Windows XP, a similar thing happens, although the utilization tops
out around 40%.  I then tried it on an older box, PIII-733, also running Windows
XP.  The result: approx. 90% CPU usage when rapidly scrolling.

So, I imagine that it's a result of my slightly slow hardware and, as you noted,
not using the proprietary nVidia drivers.

-M.