stopthegop wrote:
I'm not sure I followed all that..? In english: Is SmartWB a good thing or a bad thing?
If you have plenty of video ram on your graphics card, good.
The basic argument against Smart Refresh is that it ought not to be needed on modern cards where the GPU can do all the drawing at such speed that you'd never see it happen. Ideally, that should be the case.
Unfortunately, there are weaknesses both in RTG itself and in driver quality before you get to the GPU that can render this argument null and void.
Smart Refresh really only relies on one GPU operation, "blitting" (which is supported by all major cards/drivers) and enough spare video card memory to hold all the obscured bits of your windows whilst they aren't visible. Saving and redrawing the windows then comes down to performing blits and not a lot else.
It's therefore usually the faster setting - with the downside that you lose more video memory in normal operation (this can affect some 3D games on cards that have limited memory).