Hey all,
please tell me about your experience with modern Nvidia GPU's and Wayland. Because mine is just terrible.
I have an RTX 3060 OC (12GB) and the card works very well on Windows and X11. My distribution is Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma) with the rpmfusion repos enabled. I use Nvidia's proprietary driver in its latest version from there, which is currently 545.29.06. Kernel 6.6.13. So it all seems very modern and up-to-date.
But everything comes crashing down when I try to use this GPU on Wayland. Yesterday I wanted to just watch a movie with mpv. After about 10 minutes, the screen started to flicker like an old CRT monitor running at a low refresh rate. I had to reboot to make it work again. Watched for another half hour or so and the screen just turned off and never turned back on again. Even switching to a console with Ctrl+F1 didn't work, but the system was still running.
The console is full of Nvidia-related errors and I have a ton of graphical glitches when I open up VS Code, for example - only part of the application refreshes properly sometimes, it seems a bit like part of the UI rendering is just massively lagging behind.
Keep in mind that all of these problems go away as soon as I switch to X11 or Windows. Is it just me or are Nvidia's drivers hot garbage and basically alpha software? I regret not going with an AMD card at this point. Even the Intel UHD620 in my notebook performs better than this.
Edit: I tried upgrading to the 550 beta driver now and it just segfaults in libnvidia-glcore.so when I try to run anything Wayland-related. Can’t even get to sddm with it anymore and have to start KDE from a TTY. Of course, xorg still works fine.
Edit #2: I was finally upgrade to the 550 beta, had to switch to Fedora 40 (which is the development branch) and patch the driver so the kernel module can be compiled. It seems to work a bit better, the UI lag isn't as massive and there are fewer glitches in VS Code. Still far from perfect, though - I still have out of order frames in Steam games and YouTube videos which are really annoying.
Does it really work on the latest driver? Does it fix flickering in Minecraft and other XWayland games?
Yes, latest driver. I don’t play Minecraft, however the settings I provided have cleared up flickering on the games I play since the 535 release.
I tried it now with these options and the latest driver 550.67. Nothing has changed, the terrible flickering is still there in all XWayland games and Steam is completely corrupted now.
Steam video: https://youtu.be/N_M9cJTeze8 Games video: https://youtu.be/aactSIQZ5l0
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https://piped.video/aactSIQZ5l0
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I’m sorry it didn’t improve anything for you. It’s made my games playable. The ones I had issues with were ARK Rocket League Helldiver and Cyberpunk. All working great now and can run fullscreen. Steam app itself has always been a mess and not improved. I don’t turn on GPU acceleration on steam.
But my overall Wayland experience works pretty well.
I just removed the nvidia.conf and the flickering and full screen glitches returned.
Looks like we are just going to have to wait for the proper fix to make its way.