Does that mean I can switch to Wayland from x11??
Yes, now is actually a pretty nice experience using Wayland with this driver
i’ve heard that one a few times before.
Wait Wayland is bad on Nvidia in the dark times before today?
XWayland (and therefore Zoom, IntelliJ IDEA, any game that runs on Wine, etc) has been borderline unusable for years due to Nvidia not supporting the way a system synchronises its rendering with the GPU, but recently all of the changes that facilitate a newer, better (and most importantly, a directly supported by Nvidia) way of synchronising got merged. This driver is the final piece of the puzzle and I can confirm that all Xwayland flickering has gone away for me.
Nvidia didn’t implement implicit sync because it was stupid and also didn’t really solve anything, it still had performance issues.
The real problem with explicit sync wasn’t Nvidia, it was the fact everything and everybody has to implement it. This problem was worse under a stack like Wayland where every piece has to reinvent the wheel.
The missing piece of the puzzle wasn’t one piece, it was all of them: explicit sync had to be implemented in the kernel, and in drivers, and in graphical libraries, and in compositors, and in apps and so on.
Nvidia released it after it was stable in the kernel.
They don’t care about Wayland or any other userland applications except their own. They don’t have to schedule their development around Wayland, why would they? It’s an emerging stack that’s not yet in use across all the Linux desktop, which is like 1% of their user base anyway.
Great points. Especially the last one, there’s been a lot of vitriol directed at Nvidia lately for “dragging their heels” or whatever, but I don’t blame them for not wanting to implement a crappy stopgap and I certainly do not blame them for the time it took to get e.g the Wayland protocol merged. I think people simply love complaining in the Linux community.
There’s a simple solution. Open up your drivers Nvidia, like Intel and AMD have done.
YOOO!!
I can’t wait to get home for this! I’m going to try to use VRR again too, see how it plays with that.
Got home, it’s working really well. Like, I’m super pleased!
VRR still needs testing on my system. I know that there’s yet to be a fix for multi-monitor VRR. I still need to test with a single monitor, though.
