How are nvidia gpus with wayland nowadays? I read a while ago it was terrible, has it improved?
I'm considering switching from Windows 10 to something either using KDE or the new Cosmic DE that System76 is working on. Right now I've got a 3060TI.
You are viewing a single comment
It largely depends on the program. If the application has native Wayland support then it usually works pretty well, but apps that only run on X11 (which need to run through Xwayland) may be a little glitchy. It will depend on a lot of different variables including drivers, model, libraries, kernel, etc. But later this month Nvidia is to release new drivers that allow "explicit sync", which should address a lot of this I believe.
It's the other way around. Wayland will add support for explicit sync. Nvidia drivers can do explicit sync, what they can't do is implicit sync, which is what's currently causing issues with Wayland + Nvidia.
All parts of the stack need to support explicit sync. All the graphical drivers, and all the Wayland compositors, and all the graphic libraries etc.
Implicit sync was a kernel workaround that everything relied on because it was easy but it was never a good solution.