Explicit sync Wayland protocol has finally been merged!

unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 361 points – linux-drm-syncobj-v1: new protocol (!90) · Merge requests · wayland / wayland-protocols · GitLab
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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

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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.

I last purchased a 2080ti, so I will probably ride that comfortably for another couple of years, but I window shop new AMD cards sometimes. I could probably convince myself to buy one even though it's unnecessary, but I use and love my mini PC case, and the newest cards are too long to fit. I really hope smaller high-end GPUs becomes a trend to push innovation in that direction. Kind of like how phones just kept getting thinner for the longest time, I want GPUs to fight for shortest.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Is the vrr flickering about explicit sync too?

Literally all rendering could flicker. So maybe.

I mean, the vrr flicker doesn't seem like a frame ordering issue since it happens on a static desktop too. Why I asked

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.

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.

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.

In addition to what others said a recent Nvidia driver update also added a workaround to reduce out of order frames without explicit sync. Ime it just made it so that resizing a flickering window makes it stop.

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)

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.

I think 535 is the only option for Wayland gaming right now, everything else is a flickery mess.

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.

How long does a change like this take to make it's way into Plasma 6?

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.

No, there are hundreds of projects that assume implicit sync. Because its worked forever on Mesa.

I've been using Wayland on two Nvidia machines for months now, is the flickering the whole screen or just some applications because until I updated my Nvidia drivers very recently I've not had any flickering issues at all

I’ve been on NVIDIA with Wayland since June 23 (which is when I switched to Linux in general) and I am still mystified what all this fuss is about. Everything just… works? What am I missing?

Depends on your card, I've had an good number of different issues between my pc and laptop

It is great to see I'm not alone, yeah, I wish people would realize that it's just hardware at the end of the day. The company does crappy stuff but individuals who work there, most of them are smart individuals just trying their hardest to develope something they can be proud of, that people can enjoy, and that might benefit society in some way.

Mostly engineers but you get my point.

Engineers are made to do things they don't want to do, not their fault but they don't really have the power to do things properly

They're still people at the end of the day. If they really disagree with the direction of the company they'll typically leave and find work elsewhere. Coming from a company like Nvidia, there's no shortage of options for those individuals.

Don't forget framework was started by a group of talented individuals from various ODM manufactures fed up with the direction laptops were going in the industry. Also look at the talent leaving game studios to create their own studios free from the influence of publishers.

I do agree with you, sometimes you gotta do things you don't want to do. The good has to outweigh the bad or generally they'll be left demotivated.

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.

If I remember right, the syncing issue was particularly egregious when you run windowed X11 programs on Wayland. So it could be that you got lucky.