From Fedora Project Wiki

NVidia issues with KDE 4

Background

There are some performance issues of NVidia proprietary driver and KWin with effects enabled.

How-to

Tweak NVidia settings.

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

Edit your xorg.conf and add these options:

Option "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"             
Option "PixmapCacheSize" "1000000"

KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK is enabled by default in KDE 4.0.3.