NVIDIA driver 550.67 released fixes for VKD3D (Proton), Wayland and more

It hasn't landed on the Ubuntu PPA yet, so I might be wrong, but looking at the release notes, I don't think it will fix flickering on Wayland (this waits for explicit sync fixes), capturing Wayland windows for Discord or Steam Link, or general crashes (this may be on the KDE side). So, I'm not holding my breath in general.

NVK is not prime time yet, 24.1 isn't even released yet (it's target day is mid-may or something like that) ;-). I hope to get it in F40 once it is so I can try to switch. Actually I decided to hold off with the upgrade until it got 24.1 (if Fedora even upgrades to minors? I think so..).


Last edited by STiAT on 19 March 2024 at 5:19 pm UTC

Let's GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Keep up the good work Nvidia.

Did this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

Did this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

Or Valve could finally move to support Wayland natively instead of relying on XWayland. That would solve the infamous flicker as well. It's super annoying nevertheless.

Or Valve could finally move to support Wayland natively instead of relying on XWayland. That would solve the infamous flicker as well. It's super annoying nevertheless.

Would it? Firefox and Chrome flicker, even though Ozone is set to Wayland. Or could it be that programs themselves still use XWayland, and just the web rendering engine uses native Wayland? I'm just a casual user without such knowledge.

Or Valve could finally move to support Wayland natively instead of relying on XWayland. That would solve the infamous flicker as well. It's super annoying nevertheless.

Would it? Firefox and Chrome flicker, even though Ozone is set to Wayland. Or could it be that programs themselves still use XWayland, and just the web rendering engine uses native Wayland? I'm just a casual user without such knowledge.

I'm no expert either but Firefox does not flicker for me independent of running on Wayland or XWayland. Or it might just be a Wayland compositor issue dunno?

I do run Wayland on Nvidia over two years now and besides some driver regression in 545.x (absolute nightmare of a driver series) which was fixed with 550.x Wayland is pretty solid over there. What I found is if an application behaves weird eg. Flickering, it's XWayland and the lag of supporting Glamour by the closed source Nvidia driver.
This also causes games running via XWayland (so most tbh) to randomly show previous frames if they run with less or more fps than your display refresh rate.

Even though Nvidia finally seems to get things right they have still some way to go and sometimes it is not even entirely their fault. Whilst I personally deem Wayland on Nvidia a lot more pleasant than X11. But I am probably very alone with this. 😅

At least this is my perception of how things are.

Did this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

Or Valve could finally move to support Wayland natively instead of relying on XWayland. That would solve the infamous flicker as well. It's super annoying nevertheless.

Maybe soon?

Explicit sync is useful for other things too from my understanding, so it would be good to finally get the protocol merged and the patches for compositors merged.

I would even install a Beta driver for this...

I'm no expert either but Firefox does not flicker for me independent of running on Wayland or XWayland. Or it might just be a Wayland compositor issue dunno?

Firefox does not flicker for me, but Chromium now flickers significantly on Plasma 6. I used to get a lot of flickering on Firefox last year which was solved by running it on Wayland.

This also causes games running via XWayland (so most tbh) to randomly show previous frames if they run with less or more fps than your display refresh rate.

Conversely, I have never experienced this on Wayland.

Even though Nvidia finally seems to get things right they have still some way to go and sometimes it is not even entirely their fault. Whilst I personally deem Wayland on Nvidia a lot more pleasant than X11. But I am probably very alone with this. 😅

I agree with both of these statements.

Did this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

The flickering nonsense is very annoying.
But if you go into Steam settings, and turn off GPU acceleration it goes away.
It’s a solution for this transition period anyway.

Did this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

The flickering nonsense is very annoying.
But if you go into Steam settings, and turn off GPU acceleration it goes away.
It’s a solution for this transition period anyway.

I turned it off because a recent update made Steam completely unusable, but the flickering doesn't go away completely. It is dramatically reduced and Download/Install/Play buttons have stopped disappearing. The Steam Overlay is still really hard to use.

Or Valve could finally move to support Wayland natively instead of relying on XWayland. That would solve the infamous flicker as well. It's super annoying nevertheless.

For me Plasma itself flickers often on Wayland, so it's not a problem of XWayland.


Last edited by axredneck on 20 March 2024 at 3:23 pm UTC

I use Ubuntu 22.04 and I don't have the option for to install anything above 545

I use Ubuntu 22.04 and I don't have the option for to install anything above 545

There is this PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Is java virus still alive?

PLLEEASE linux devs fix this at the next arch linux release

Just today the nvidia-driver-550 version showed up on Ubuntu 22.04