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.
Good to see I’m not alone with this. I have multiple monitors with various resolutions (4K, 2K and an old 1600x1200 VGA screen) and I like the fractional scaling methods Wayland has. It makes it really easy to combine all of these screens into one useable area.
Fractional scaling on X11 can be enabled but it’s such a massive performance hit, that it doesn’t make any fun or sense to use it.
On my UHD 620, Wayland is rock-solid. Everything just works, it never crashes, I don’t have any glitches and the performance is great. On Nvidia, when it’s not just crashing it still feels laggy. Even moving around windows seem to be a struggle for the system and it’s so sad to see that.
Hopefully this will improve in the near future.