New User Nvidia Flickering?

Bazzite
1

Hi

I just installed Bazzite yesterday and everything seems to work fine but there is this horrible flickering with input delay. I have a RTX 2060s which runs helldivers 2 at 60 fps but the whole system has this weird flickering that makes even typing difficult.

I’ve done some research, and I’ve seen that this may be related to Nvidia drivers(I’m on 550.78) and x11. but I downloaded the nvidia desktop version? So I really don’t know what to do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

2

Hi,

Are you using wayland instead of X11? If so, try switching to X11 in the login window screen (bottom left corner on KDE) and see if that solves it. I had the same issue and that worked for me.

3

Is that in the info center? It says I’m on weyland but I don’t know how to change it.

Thank you for the response!

4

i figured it out! i didn’t know the text in the login window was a button so it didn’t make sense at first

thank you!!!

1 Like
5

Glad to hear that worked!

6

This answered my question if KDE is locked to only wayland or i can run it with X11.
Good to see that I’m free to choose X11 so i will give it a go and try!!

1 Like
7

Is there another way to fix this issue? It’s nice that I can revert to X11 to resolve these issues (and there are many issues), but it’s also a degraded experience in other ways to use X11.

The issues I’m seeing on Wayland include:

  • Not being able to copy/paste into applications (such as Slack, Discord, and others)
  • Constant flickering in many apps (Slack, Discord, Steam, and others)
  • Text input not working correctly on many apps (Slack, Discord, Steam, and others)

On X11 performance seems rather degraded:

  • Dragging windows results in MASSIVE ghosting
  • Interacting with various windows or UI elements just seems slower
    • Clicking a documentation or website link The Discover app takes MINUTES to open a link
    • Closing a window can take minutes
  • All kinds of graphical glitches
    • For example, some windows show the content of other application for tens of seconds or minutes at a time before they render their own content
  • There are no window related animations, this makes for a rather jarring experience overall
  • Audio seems significantly quieter

I’ve seen folks elsewhere say they have been able to downgrade their Nvidia driver to resolve these issues. Is that easy to do with Bazzite? Is it documented somewhere?

8

Ok, so the issues I’m seeing are kind of a perfect storm of problems. Right now (May 2024) is basically the worst possible time for an Nvidia user to try and use Bazzite, or Fedora in general. There are several issues that all lead to the problems I am seeing, all of which combined make Bazzite completely worthless to anyone with an Nvidia card. I am not presently aware of any workarounds, you just have to wait for updates to fix the known issues. The good news is that the updates are on their way.

Issue #1:

Wayland didn’t have a proper way to sync with Nvidia cards (other graphics card providers do). This is now partially resolved. Wayland now has a feature called Explicit Sync, however downstream support needs to be added to the Nvidia drivers, as well as window managers. More information can be found here:

and here:

Issue #2:

X11 is currently broken on Fedora systems with KDE Plasma 6, as reported here:

and here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1ctoudc/the_most_recent_fedora_update_broke_x11/

Bug fixes for the X11 issue appear to have been merged, but have not yet been released.

So, if you’re an Nvidia user and you want to use Bazzite you are basically out of luck. Wayland will not work properly with a lot of different applications (especially anything Electron based, but not exclusively Electron), and X11 is broken so the only alternative is also not viable.

I’ll be waiting until the new Wayland explicit sync features are merged everywhere before trying again.

1 Like
9

Has there been any movement on these issues? I installed Aurora, which I believe is Bazzite without gaming, and for desktop use it seemed alright. I did switch to X11 but I didn’t notice any real problems with either X or Wayland.

10

Good news. It looks like our issues will be solved when the nvidia 555 stable driver is released.

Check the nvidia section here:

11

nvidia 555 beta go!
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1cx8jkj/nvidia_555_beta_driver_released/