6mo ago

Those who are using Nvidia's driver 555, what's your experience in Wayland so far? Those who are using it in conjunction with KDE 6.1, what's your experience with multi-monitor VRR in Wayland?

I currently have an AMD video card (6700 XT) and Wayland support is excellent. Also, multi-monitor support in Wayland works perfectly.

So what's your experience with Nvidia's 555 driver in Wayland? Those using it in conjunction with KDE 6.1, what's your experience with multi-monitor VRR? I ask about VRR because I heard that multi-monitor VRR in Wayland is still problematic.

This is for my own curiosity if an Nvidia video card could be considered as an upgrade option.

17 comments

I wasn’t having many issues to begin with, but with the introduction of explicit sync into Kwin, and driver improvements throughout the 555 beta series, it’s been just about perfect for me.
The only issue i’ve encountered so far is the panel freezing sometimes. Submit a bug report to both KDE and Nvidia, they’re working on it.

I don't use VRR, but I meet the rest of your criteria
Electron apps were the biggest pain pont - I would be typing in discord and there was noticeable lag and letters would disappear until I have several characters beyond them. I worked around this by using discord on their website in a browser tab.
Not sure which update resolved this, but it's now working as I expect it to, so I think if you choose to use a Nvidia GPU, you should have an okay time. I would just say to consider a beefier AMD GPU as well, since they tend to have much better driver support in Linux
- The input lag and flickering on Electron apps was fixed with the explicit sync drivers.

I'm using 555 open with hyprland. No issues and I can finally suspend and resume, using the NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 module param after being unable to all year.
Imo stick to amd. I was like you, I thought the Nvidia card would be an upgrade and I thought the rumors of how bad Nvidia was had to be at least a little exaggerated, but honestly it's a constant pita. Aside from the suspend issue I've had random minor system upgrades cause kernel panics and fry my boot more than once this year. That bug is still unresolved btw, their response time leaves much to be desired.
Having dockerized ollama just work is nice, but it's not worth it, and they seem to be close to a working vulkan based runner for that anyway.

I'm using a 3080 under Plasma, and I thought 555 was doing great, since I could finally use electron apps without input lag or flickers. I didn't bother much with gaming since VRR does't work if the NVIDIA GPU has more than one display enabled on it (you can use a second GPU or an iGPU to workaround that). I decided to give it a go anyways, wrote a script that turns off my second screen when I open a game and enables it again when it closes.
Unfortunately, 555 was unusable for me. After a short while, Xwayland would crash and either Steam and the game would instantly close or my entire system would freeze, requiring a reboot. I thought this was an issue with Steam, so after some extensive log collection, I opened an issue on their GitHub and shortly after a dev analysed them and told me that my issue was likely due to explicit sync, and asked me to downgrade to a pre-explicit sync driver.
I went back to 550.90 and my crashes stopped completely. It also stopped a coredump spam of glsdisplay by Steam, and also fixed a power draw bug in which my GPU would never go below 100W, even on idle. I never had issues with games flickering previously, and I still don't have it now, and I was able to fix the electron apps flicker and input lag by setting ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland on my env, so for now I'm sticking to 550.
I also opened a bug report on NVIDIA's forums and I'm waiting for any input.

VRR does not work if you have a NVIDIA card and more than one monitor enabled. If you disable extra monitors it'll work, but that's hardly a workaround (and it's one of the main reasons I'm still on Windows).
I'm also getting a lot of xwayland crashes while playing or simply when trying to drag a window, those crashes freeze my entire PC and I have to reboot.
To be fair, most, if not all of my issues preventing me from fully moving to Linux seem to be fixed by using an AMD card, but I'm not in the market for a new card (I have a 3080) nor do I want to lose DLSS, which is a game changer to me.
- It's really unfortunate. Multi-monitor VRR is a must as I'm a gamer and I'd like my second monitor to be active when I'm playing, so I can use Discord and browse game guides, for example. I think I'll continue to buy AMD graphics cards until this issue is resolved.
- VRR does not work if you have a NVIDIA card and more than one monitor enabled.
  I recently learned that's not entirely correct for Wayland. The critical thing is that VRR stops working if more than one enabled monitor is connected to the NVIDIA GPU. Meaning that if you connect only one display to the NVIDIA GPU and the other monitors to the integrated GPU it should just work.
  I felt pretty stupid when I realized that I could've just switched a single cable and be using VRR way earlier. Didn't even need a reboot to work. For reference, I'm using a NVIDIA GPU + AMD CPU with 1 G-Sync as my main monitor and one non-VRR as my secondary monitor.
  
  That... Makes sense, really. And how would you do on about it? Just switching the cable to the motherboard IO? No need to use stuff like optimus?
  Sadly I will have to live with this issue since my 5900x has no iGPU, but I do plan to upgrade to a 7800x3d

I had to use X11 before because using Wayland introduced many bugs (like freezing of some popups and the bottom tray). With updating to Fedora 40, Wayland became the default, which, again, caused many bugs mostly in electron apps (discord) a I wasn't able to play a minecraft modpack because the whole screen was flickering. But after installing the nvidia driver 555 (still in beta at that time), everythings runs smoothly.

I haven't been able to use it. I'm on Endeavour with KDE and every time I try to log in with Wayland I get a black screen and a very laggy mouse. The programs I open have streaks of black through them and are also laggy Not sure if I have some weird stuff installed in the background, but I've had to go back to X11
- I've decided due to running into issues as well, that my system being built on x11 for a few years means I probably wont switch to wayland until I do a fresh install to avoid any potential issues around old x11 packages i'm running

Multi monitor VRR has never been problematic in Wayland, but the NVidia kernel driver doesn't support it at all yet, Xorg or Wayland doesn't matter.
- Indeed. I have an AMD video card and multi-monitor VRR works beautifully in Wayland. But unfortunately, according to some replies (and yours), Nvidia doesn't support it yet.

I'm on a Intel i7-6700K with a RTX2060 and Wayland used to be unusable for me before the 555 drivers. Stuttery games, etc. 555 made it all usuable, tho I don't have a VRR monitor, so I can't tell if that makes a huge difference there.
On Bazzite:testing

Ubuntu 24.04 + Gnome 46 + Wayland + Nvidia Rtx 3070 Ti + Driver v555 + Kernel v6.9.3
Initially noticed a minor lag when opening Application windows. Then reinstalled libnvidia-egl-wayland1 and apparently that lag is now gone. But, honestly I feel Wayland had more smoother performance with v550, than v555.

17 comments