On the 4.0.4-stable, I’ve noticed ugly jagged lines in the 3d-viewer. The solution I’ve found somewhere, that works for me, is to change the NVidia settings to use Custom preferences for picture adjustment (perfomance/quality tradeoff).
By default it’s set to “Application decides” (somehow Kicad decides to use no antialiasing by default). Turning to custom/high quality improves the quality of the 3d view.
IMHO it should be enabled by default, as for the board preview the FPS does not matter (much).
These things are subjective. Recently there was a complaint about slow 3d rendering under Arch Linux, so you will never find one setting that pleases everyone
If I’m not mistake, (on the old stable version of) 3DViewer tries to enable AA by default. That may be not working properly and there were some issues with wxWidgets (openGL related).
Is there any way you could try a more updated version of KiCad (perhaps some night builds) ?
As I’m running production environment on my machine, would not feel comfortable to go for a “nigthty”. My main machine is a Lenovo T420 running Win7/64, with the NVS4200 video chip (driver ver 354.45). I have a spare one, but with a different video chip (ATI HD3400), might check this one with 4.0.4, and then with nightly.