Gaming with Wayland with NVidia 550 and 555 drivers

Hi y'all,

So I read recently that the latest NVidia drivers (550 I think) had some big performance and compatibility improvements to work with Wayland. So I went and gave it a shot. I went ahead and upgraded my drivers to the aforementioned version, installed plasma-workspace-wayland and rebooted.

For your info, I have a 1440p 144Hz monitor and a NVidia GeForce RTX 3070. My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and I got 32GB of RAM.

I tried Mullet MadJack and GhostRunner, which are running fine using X11 on current drivers btw. The performance was awful. I was getting no more than 10 FPS. I did a bit of searching and found I was missing the libnvidia-egl-wayland1 package. Installed it, rebooted just in case and tried again. The FPS was much better. 144FPS for Mullet Madjack and in the 100+ FPS for GhostRunner.The problem I noticed however was how BAD the shearing was in the image in both games. Even if it had no problem running the game.

I went ahead and upgraded the NVidia driver to 555 since some other Reddit post recommended it. But I ran into a slew of other issues. The Plasma compositor crashed all the time, and if my PC went to sleep, my desktop and windows, menu, everything wouldn't get drawn completely and the mouse cursor left a trail everywhere. I had to eyeball click through my menu to log out and go back to X11.

It looks like there's still some improvements that need to be made. Until then I'll stick with X11.

warmaster ,

Kubuntu is fine. But for gaming, having old packages is very good for stability, but bad for gaming. In the latter use case, having access to the latest drivers and compositors, will grant you a better gaming experience.

A humble question: have you considered switching to another distro with newer packages?

cyborganism OP ,

Yeah I've looked into other distributions. So far Kubuntu fits the bill just fine for me.

I don't have enough spare time to mess around with troubleshooting issues, so stability is what I'm looking for and the Ubuntu flavors provide just that without being too outdated. And they provide 3rd party drivers out of the box.

I hear Fedora might be a good alternative, but I heard it's a bit more difficult to find 3rd party support for hardware.

jemikwa ,

Adjacently, Nobara is based on Fedora for gaming, uses KDE, and has a lot of packages pre-installed for a nicer end user experience. I used to use Kubuntu as my first foray into Linux desktop but I ran into a few issues. Nobara has been overall more stable and more reliable for my daily use.

cyborganism OP ,

Oh yeah! I haven't tried it out yet. I've been testing some distros on VMs (I know, not the best way to test but that's the best I can do.) It has a patched kernel for gaming and everything. That's nice.

I'll give it a shot. :)

sugar_in_your_tea ,

FWIW, I had problems even with AMD GPU on KDE Plasma 5, but Plasma 6 is solid. So maybe stick with X11 until your distro updates to 6.

beaxingu ,
@beaxingu@kbin.run avatar

Im confident that plasma Wayland worked before but for a couple weeks now plasma itself is black after i updated. but other programs do start up and can be seen but because plasma is black its unusable. im just looking for when it works again.

cyborganism OP ,

I'm on Kubuntu so still using version 5.x.

The symptoms I got was like when a Windows app crashes and does this "Solitaire" effect. It did that with the mouse pointer and everything else. Windows, taskbars and menus all displayed as outlines only with no icons or decorations inside. It was weird.

muhyb ,

I guess it's time to try Hyprland again.

mrvictory1 ,

New driver may have failed to load. Use "nvidia-smi" to query driver status and do a full system update.

Vash63 ,

555.58 works great for me in Wayland. 3090 on Arch with Gnome

furzegulo ,

i'm using 4070tis on plasma wayland and haven't had any problems with gaming or other desktop usage with the newest drivers.

dinckelman ,

555.58 just came out, you should be using that if you're on Nvidia, together with an updated compositor for whichever desktop you have

zelifcam , (edited )
@zelifcam@lemmy.world avatar

you should be using that

555.xx Driver + Plasma 6.1.1 = Janky

Just updated my workstation this morning and the Desktop is now stuttering and glitchy.

550.xx + Plasma 6.1 = was working perfect.

nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0

This does not fix the issue.

Solution:
Revert back to 550.90.07.

555 Driver Firefox Crashing:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1898476

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3504

Plasma Bugs with new driver:

https://discuss.kde.org/t/wayland-plasma-6-1-nvidia-555-intermittent-application-stuttering/17629

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/major-kde-plasma-desktop-frameskip-lag-issues-on-driver-555/293606/6

https://www.reddit.com/r/arch/comments/1drq23o/kde_plasma_61_nvidia_555_intermittent_application/

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/kde-stuttering-after-updating-to-6-1-on-g14-2023/123628/4

Defaced ,

Latest mesa + plasma 6.1.1 = janky as well

Window dodging recently broke on me so I can't dodge windows on any of the panels properly anymore, was working great on 6.1. Certain windows will cause the desktop to lock up and I can't click on any windows or icons in the panel task manager. The global menu only works half the time now. I'm getting severe mouse cursor stuttering on a 120Hz display on the desktop, certain games running proton that were fine before have micro stutter. It's been a pretty terrible experience on the AMD side recently.

dinckelman ,

555.58.02 just came out to address this issue. Hope that helps

Defaced ,

It would if I were using Nvidia but I use AMD.

sjosjo ,
@sjosjo@mas.to avatar

@dinckelman @cyborganism which wlroots version is ready for explicit sync, do you know?

sjosjo ,
@sjosjo@mas.to avatar

@dinckelman @cyborganism after a lot of searching… upcoming wlroots 0.18 will have the necessary patch (linux-drm-syncobj-v1: new protocol)

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&milestone_title=0.18.0

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