I recently installed KDE on my PC. I’ve noticed that KDE animations are laggy when I use Wayland. For example, this happens when I minimize a window or open Application Launcher. But there’s no problem when I use KDE X11. Is it a bug?
My system:
Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.4.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.10.2-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
Memory: 23.4 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080/PCIe/SSE2
Are you using the Nouveau drivers (open source) or the propriertary ones from Nvidia? I have a similar setup, but on Fedora. I first used Nouveau and noticed some lag, then switched to the propriertary ones (from the RPM repos, not from Nvidia’s website) and the lagging was gone. But that was several months ago, so may not be related.
Look if you have an option to change a PRIME profile in the x-server settings. Maybe the driver is stuck in power-save mode and using your integrated GPU instead the dedicated for rendering. Also just to make sure Vulkan and drivers are working as they should I would recommend downloading fur-mark and running it with Vulkan, 1080p and dedicated gpu. With your gpu it should be ~60fps if not more.
Easy way to check if your using dedicated gpu for rendering Plasma is to run “nvidia-smi” in the terminal. If it says it is running some processes it means desktop is being rendered with dedicated gpu.
Also did you by any chance tried disabling the animations and efffects to see if the problem goes away?
I don’t have “prime profiles” in nvidia-settings. fur-mark shows me about 150 fps. nvidia-smi only shows RTX 2080. The problem is just lagging animations like minimizing windows, opening application menus, etc.
What’s interesting is that the lags in the same cases(and on the same windows) are often different. That is, sometimes the animation can be about 7 FPS, and sometimes 30 FPS. But in general all animations are a little bit laggy.
Well that just sets more questions than it answers. It mighht be somwthing to do with how dependecies are set, plasma wayland incorrect config or just something third. In my expirience I would just recommend to reinstall Plasma and if the lag keeps coming back try some other Wayland DE like GNOME or Hyprland or just install complete Arch expirience like Endavour OS or idk Nyarch or any of
them.
I found similar problems in Hyprland. I also tried resetting all KDE configs and reinstalling it, but that didn’t help. There are no problems on the Nyarch distribution.
What can I do? What could be the problem? Kernel configuration, Wayland or something else?
I really didn’t expect you to install Nyarch but ok. if nyarch workes its probably that you missed something while following the guide for installing plasma on arch. Maybe some caviat with your hardware or something that you missed, but to save you hours of debugging I would just recommend you to delete all of the Nyarch stuff you don’t need untill you get to purely arch with working plasma. Think of it as alternative way of installing Plasma, going backwards ;3 . Probably not the solution you were hoping for but if it works don’t fix it.
But if you want to still keep on searching I would look at maybe missing some specific dependecy or bad default config making it fall to, as it looks, software rendering or bad intagrated gpu rendering, instead of using dedicated gpu. But I don’t feel time spend would be worth it, but you do you.
I had something similar, I suspect, and had to add a kernel parameter to avoid the “GSP offloading” (which is apparently buggy in the Nvidia 555 drivers) causing problems:
Thats really odd. I am also mainly Fedora user and have also had newest driver as soon as possible and I am also on plasma, but had no problem with the driver. Could be cuz I’m using rtx 30 series, but it is interesting non-the-less.