After almost two years, KDE Plasma’s animations finally look good again on Nvidia cards
Summary
- Plasma 6.7.3 re-enables triple buffering for Nvidia after a nearly two-year disablement due to a KWin sync bug.
- Disabled since Oct over multi-GPU copy glitches; KWin sync bug fix allows enabling it again.
- Grab Plasma 6.7.3 now to fix Nvidia stutters; Plasma 6.8 will add Spectacle audio to video recordings.
If you’ve used KDE Plasma on an Nvidia card lately and felt the animations weren’t as smooth as they could be, it’s not just you. Ever since October 2024, triple buffering has been disabled for Nvidia hardware due to a bug. Fortunately, the fix has just been released as part of Plasma 6.7.3, and you can grab it now.
KDE Plasma 6.7.3 brings triple buffering back to Nvidia chips
It took a little break, but it’s good to see it back
As announced on the KDE blog, Plasma 6.7.3 has been released. The new patch bundles together two weeks’ worth of patches, tweaks, and translations, and delivers them for all Plasma users to enjoy. While KDE doesn’t list a highlights reel of the most important, influential fixes in Plasma 6.7.3, my personal favorite is simply listed in the changelog as “allow triple buffering on Nvidia again.”
If we check out the commit link, we see what happened exactly:
It was disabled because of glitches with multi-GPU copies, which turned out to be a synchronization bug in KWin. Since the bug is fixed, and there don’t seem to be any other issues anymore, we can enable it by default.
The community originally disabled it back in October 2025, so this patch has been just shy of two years in the making. If you were affected by this bug, downloading KDE Plasma 6.7.3 should smooth out those annoying desktop and animation stutters that plain double-buffering couldn’t get.
While it’s still a few months until KDE Plasma 6.8 releases, it’s already shaping up with some killer features. For example, the new version will add the ability to record audio with Spectacle’s video recorder, which is a missing feature that has personally bugged me for a while now.
