Hi! So this isn't really a 'tech help' post, more a 'I dunno what I should do in this situation' post, lol.

I have a nvidia 3070 GPU and a multi-monitor setup consisting of 2 monitors. I recently switched from Windows to Kubuntu 24 LTS in June and it works great, for the most part. However, I noticed some pretty crazy screen tearing ingame, and the option that always gets recommended to nvidia users, the one to 'Force full composition pipeline' sadly does not work for me to resolve this issue. So I tried to see whether I could get g-sync (or more adaptive sync) to work, since my gaming monitor is g-sync compatible and I previously had it working on Windows. However, I've met a dead end. On X, it only seems to work with just the primary monitor enabled, meaning that I have to turn off the secondary monitor in plasma system settings. Contrary to what the arch wiki claims, setting it to mirror the primary monitor did not work. Also, I found a post on Reddit that claimed you could get G-Sync to work by connecting the secondary monitor to the i-GPU. That didn't work either (I have a 13600K with a UHD 770 iGPU from intel).

Then I tried to investigate more advanced options like gamescope (the microcompositor that is used on the Steam Deck which apparently allows for VRR) but it was really, really glitchy. Maybe I didn't set the nvidia DRM kernel param right, but I had countless issues with getting gamescope to work. So first of all, there is no package candidate for gamescope on the ubuntu repository due to dependency issues, so I couldn't install it the normal way. then i found gamescope on flatpak but that had the same issue. Then I found a random comment on the internet for installing the dependenecy, and this is how I got it to work. Kind of. It just opens into a black screen unless I use the -f fullscreen flag, and crashes. Also trying to run mangohud or mangoapp ontop of it also caused it to crash. Honestly I don't have much hope for getting gamescope to work on this, ever.

I had previously investigated wayland (which according to arch wiki doesn't have this multi-monitor issue) on this but it seems like neither my ubuntu base nor the plasma version is new enough for it. And i'm still using ancient nvidia drivers (535) because anything newer produces a shocking array of bugs for me, like not being able to find my card when I tried the 545 driver. Needless to say, running wayland did not work. At all. the one time I tried, plasma crashed so hard that I only got a black screen.

So, I'm not sure what to do now to get G-Sync working with multiple monitors. Should I continue to investigate wayland? Or try gamescope again, maybe I did something wrong with setting it up. Sadly I don't have an amd gpu to see if it would perform better on amd :(

Thanks for reading through this, and have a nice day!