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You may have seen news recently about explicit sync for Wayland, but you might not know why it's actually important for the future of Linux on Wayland.

I get it, Linux has a lot of these fancy sounding confusing things that are often a pretty big deal, but there's at times a real lack of a good explanation on what they do and why they're needed. So, KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written up a great blog post going over a bit more about it. I do suggest you give it a read if you wish to learn more about it and what the previous problems where with other methods.

The biggest part of the problem has been, surprise — NVIDIA, since the proprietary NVIDIA driver doesn't support the older implicit sync at all. NVIDIA users have seen lots of issues due to all of this like significant flickering and frame pacing issues. Although seeing the issues does depend on various factors.

To sum it up, as Hugl said: "With the explicit sync protocol being implemented in compositors and very soon in Xwayland and the proprietary NVidia driver, all those problems will finally be a thing of the past, and the biggest remaining blocker for NVidia users to switch to Wayland will be gone."

Sounds great. So once everything is merged in and live, plus a new NVIDIA driver is released to take advantage of it, Wayland on Linux should be in really good shape for all users. A Beta NVIDIA driver is expected around May 15th that supports explicit sync.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

whizse Apr 8
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I thought explicit sync was already supported, turns out it was only Nvidia users on Wayland getting their expletives in-sync.
logge Apr 8
Will this fix my extreme FPS losing issues with steam games? Cs2 is running on (perceived) 10fps when on Wayland (kde, arch) as opposed it runs smoothly on X (kde, arch)


Last edited by logge on 8 April 2024 at 7:36 pm UTC
Minux Apr 8
I really hope so Liam. I really do. Almost every single problem I've had related to Linux has been somehow tied to Nvidia.

So I'm trying to keep hope on this one. There's still a huge amount of time until I can finally switch to AMD. So I'm limited to these kind of changes.

Thanks as always for keeping us updated with these articles!

Be a great day once NVIDIA gets better 10bit colour support and properly balanced HDR (is desaturated and wrong exposure atm).

On top of that need DLSS Frame Gen support.

THEN I can fully switch to Linux, well at least 99% of the stuff I do anyway.
Quoting: TheRiddickBe a great day once NVIDIA gets [..] properly balanced HDR (is desaturated and wrong exposure atm).
Is HDR even available at all? As far as I know, KDE only offers a partially-implemented version of HDR on their Wayland session.
F.Ultra Apr 9
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: TheRiddickBe a great day once NVIDIA gets [..] properly balanced HDR (is desaturated and wrong exposure atm).
Is HDR even available at all? As far as I know, KDE only offers a partially-implemented version of HDR on their Wayland session.

gamescope
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: TheRiddickBe a great day once NVIDIA gets [..] properly balanced HDR (is desaturated and wrong exposure atm).
Is HDR even available at all? As far as I know, KDE only offers a partially-implemented version of HDR on their Wayland session.

gamescope
Ah, that's true.
pilk Apr 13
Quoting: whizseturns out it was only Nvidia users on Wayland getting their expletives in-sync.
Nvidia user, can fffffffffrickin confirm this. Waiting patiently for the explicit sync update.
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