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

  • CalcProgrammer1
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.