Since nvidia drivers do not properly implement implicit sync, this protocol not existing is the root cause of flickering with nvidia graphics on Wayland. This MR being merged means that Wayland might finally be usable with nvidia graphics with the next driver release.
EDIT: Nvidia dev posted that support is planned in the 555 driver, with beta release planned for May 15: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/pull/104#issuecomment-2010292221
Bought AMD never looked back
Rather, I bought from the vendor who contributed their GPU drivers to the Linux Kernel. It just so happened that’s AMD.
NVIDIA sycophants hate that one weird trick.
Honestly… I don’t really have anything against Nvidia, but I do. It’s really a good company, but it sucks.
Those are my lines :D
Nvidia sycophants just call you an idiot for wasting your time on linux. :/
Lol, down votes from chumps who can’t tell the difference between NVIDIA’s excellent hardware and Nvidia’s shitty business practice.
Is this MR NVIDIA related? It looks independent from that.
P.S fuck NVIDIA nonetheless
Good for you.
Stayed with X11 and have no problems.
God I fucking hope so man. I’m so tired of Nvidia not working on Wayland properly. It’ll be so nice to have VRR and gSync on Wayland without the awful flickering.
Questions from someone still on xmonad/x11, with 3 computers that have nvidia cards:
Do all nvidia cards have trouble in wayland currently, or is it just some subset?
Is it really unususable, or just really annoyingly flickery?
Would my card be usable now (without this merge) if I was using the nouveau driver?
Once this is merged, will all nvidia cards work in wayland? Or do we not really know yet.
Nouveau should have already been fine, this should fix the proprietary driver’s issues. AFAIK this is a core issue of the proprietary driver, so should affect all cards.
I tried Wayland on my 16xx series GPU, Electron apps were only annoying, but games were unplayable. The desktop itself and Wayland native apps worked fine, though.
so are you on x11? what drivers? having some issues with my 1660ti, curious what youre running
Plasma 6 X11, 550 proprietary driver.
think I’m on Wayland, will try and switch. what exact GPU? mobile or regular?
Desktop 1660S
The Nvidia driver on Wayland has been decent for a couple of years and stabilized a lot over the past ~6 months. The flickering issue was specific to XWayland. Normal Wayland apps don’t have flickering problems (not quite sure why tbh), but XWayland apps would often rapidly flicker between 2 frames since it only supported implicit sync, which confused the Nvidia driver, which only supports explicit sync. Now with a Wayland protocol for explicit sync, XWayland can be updated to support it and resolve the flickering there.
I only have experience with my current GPU (3070 ti) and only in Hyprland, but the only flickering I have is in steam windows, everything else works flawlessly on 535 driver. Still excited that it may be fixed soon!
On 3060 mobile, there is flickering in steam and chrome, but it’s usable. In chrome I believe it can be fixed by disabling hardware acceleration.
For what it’s worth, I have only minor issues on wayland with nvidia, and all were fixable by changing some configuration option or something.
Maybe my demands aren’t too heavy, but I do play games. I also use gentoo which makes fixing things easier.
Maybe if your games are Wayland native or you’re still running the 535 driver? I saw fbdev=1 as a workaround, but that made things very jello-y.
It’s not really card related, but rather it just comes up sometimes in niche circumstances. I only had this on my second monitor and then it went away with an nvidia driver update. (since then i moved to amd)
The root cause of Nvidia flicker is Nvidia ecosystem being a total shitshow. This has nothing to do with drivers and how bad they are, or how Nvidia refuses to open source even the base of their desktop card drivers, or that the few tools they contribute to in in the OSS space to work around that are awful, or that the entire Linux environment for Nvidia is all about the datacenter (what an insane mess that is).
Good luck Nvidia+Linux fanboys.
Well, this is the root cause of this specific issue if you treat nvidia’s part of the stack as some barely changable black box (which is what it is right now). It’s not that I disagree open source drivers would be better, I just already own an nvidia GPU :/
I’d argue the root cause was Nvidia insisting that X11 was the future, they’d never support Wayland, and refusing to participate in any of the design processes. As a result when they got dragged kicking and screaming into supporting Wayland, nothing that had been developed without Nvidia suited their hardware or drivers.
They first tried to throw their weight around by forcing EGLStreams on everyone, failed, and they’ve been scrambling to catch up ever since.
Sure, I agree, but Nvidia proprietary driver is still the best for gaming, isn’t it?
The AMD radv driver is best for gaming at the moment IMO. If you’re stuck with NVIDIA hardware then yes, the proprietary driver is the best for gaming as the open source driver is quite slow, but the good news is that this is rapidly changing after being stagnant for 5+ years. NVK is the new open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver in Mesa and it just recently left experimental to be included officially in the next Mesa release. Also, NVIDIA’s GSP firmware changes mean that the open source nouveau kernel driver can finally reclock NVIDIA GPUs to high performance clocks/power states thus it could achieve performance parity with the proprietary driver with enough optimization. On my RTX 3070 laptop it is still significantly slower and some games don’t work yet, but there is no flickering or tearing that I experience with the proprietary driver. Unfortunately for GTX 10 series users, these cards do not use GSP firmware and have no means of reclocking still so they will be stuck using only proprietary drivers for the forseeable future.
Yes, for that to change we have to wait for the NVK based driver - nova.
AFAIK we still need this merge request here for it to actually affect 99% of games, because they all run with Xwayland, right? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967
Yes, but that’s bound to be merged quickly, the protocol itself was the main holdup from what I understand.
We also need support for the new protocol in Nvidia’s driver. Support will be available in driver 555, the beta of which will be released on May 15. So there’s still some time to wait until it’s fully fixed.
Currently yes, tho Wine has gotten pretty far with Wayland support, so it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Wine Wayland be useable for gaming in the next year or two.
Does it have to be supported in wlroots/composers, or are these changes in wayland enough? Edit: nevermind, the pr links other prs, such as https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/4262
I saw a comment from an nvidia dev somewhere that XWayland support is enough to resolve the flickering, but compositor support is needed for best performance.
I’m all for progress, I hope it helps people, but I haven’t had any issues with my Nvidia card and my two monitors on Wayland.
so was the problem wayland not doing something correctly or nvidia not doing something correctly 🤔
Well correct is a matter of opinion.
Nvidia doesn’t support implicit sync, because they view explicit sync as more correct, it lets the driver do fewer things that might be wrong and perform better. This is true.
The Linux world often assumes implicit sync works. This was never true.
so another ‘just wayland things’?
Well, kind of. This is an example of everybody doing it one way and NVIDIA doing something else. So, we should not lose sight of this being NVIDIA being a poor team player and expecting the world to revolve around them.
That said, you can argue that the way NVIDIA wants to work is more correct and that a “complete” Wayland implementation should support that approach.
It is totally fair to see this as a missing feature in Wayland ( so “just wayland things” ). However, a more collaborative NVIDIA could have absolutely made a better experience for their users in the meantime ( as AMD has for example ).
Taken in combination, this is why so many of the “I use Wayland and it works just fine” people do not use NVIDIA and why so many of the “Wayland is not ready” people are NVIDIA users.
Reading the tea leaves, things should generally work for most people by the time the major distros make their releases in the fall ( eg. Ubuntu 24.10 ). By then, many of these improvements to Wayland will have made their way to shipping code. At the same time, improvements to both the NVIDIA proprietary drivers and NVK will have done the same. The fact the Wayland support in Wine will have matured by then may also be a factor.
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