Hi I've committed a blur effect into SVN. Blur effect blurs background of translucent windows, thus making it possible to actually read text on translucent windows (without blurring the background may make it very difficult to make out smaller details such as text). I've made some screenshots as well: http://freehackers.org/~rivo/kwin/kwin-blur1.jpg shows konqueror with 75% transparency on top of konsole and ark. As you can see, the konqi's text is still very readable while you can also see when something happens in the konsole window below. For comparision, http://freehackers.org/~rivo/kwin/kwin-blur1-noblur.jpg shows the same scene without blurring. It's much more difficult to read the text when it's on top of konsole's text. http://freehackers.org/~rivo/kwin/kwin-blur2.jpg (the dots are KSnapShot artifact) shows that even with 50% translucency, text remains quite readable. I won't even make a comparision shot for that ;-) Which graphics card does it need? It uses shaders and render targets, so ATM it needs GeForce 6000 or up (not so sure about ATI cards, Radeon x500 or something and up may work). Once I get our GLRenderTarget to work with ARB_texture_rectangle, it will also work on cards not supporting NPOT textures, that is GeForce 5000 / Radeon 9500 and up. I'm not sure if those cards are fast enough for everyday usage though... Technical details follow: It does not use stencil buffer. Instead it first checks whether there are any translucent windows. If yes, then windows are rendered onto texture which is then blurred and used as background for the translucent window. Problem is that if there are multiple translucent windows, then blurring will be done multiple times which tears performance down quite a bit. Further optimizations should be possible though and if it turns out that stencil approach is necessary for decent speed, then I might consider doing that as well. Blur is gaussian blur with radius of 4, but thanks to texture filtering tricks it's quite fast. It might be possible to get it a bit faster by using smaller radius, but I'm not sure it's worth it. Different blur method probably wouldn't help much either. Finally, there is a strange rendering bug when multiple translucent windows are active (there's weird 1-pixel border around some widgets when/after they're highlighted). Screenshot: http://freehackers.org/~rivo/kwin/kwin-blur-bug.jpg Maybe someone can guess what's causing this... Rivo _______________________________________________ Kwin mailing list Kwin@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kwin