Hello all, this is my first post here but I’ve used kde for a good many years and I just wanted to say its by far my favorite desktop environment and I am beyond grateful for the insane amount of work that the community has put into it.
Anyhow, I was reading so many posts hyping about Plasma 6.1 and its support for explicit sync with the nvidia 555 driver so I decided to give it a go. For some context on Plasma 6 / Nvidia 550 I was having no stuttering with wayland native applications but any native X11 application was either a mess or literally unusable. Now, after updating to Plasma 6.1 and the beta nvidia driver, I seem to be having the exact opposite problem, wayland applications are intermittently stuttering while X11 ones feel amazingly smooth (LOL). I am using wayland, I did double check haha. Its espcially noticable when scrolling in firefox (I also installed google chrome to test and had the same issue). For a few seconds it’d feel smooth and then all of a sudden it would become very choppy.
I do not have a high refresh rate monitor so these stutters are very noticeable, and while they do not make the system unusable it is rather annoying. The stuttering also seems to sometimes occur when opening windows (for example plasma settings) or navigating the plasma enviornment (for example going in and out of the action menu to switch virtual desktops).
After reading this report (I cannot include links but the post is titled [MAJOR] KDE Plasma Desktop Frameskip/Lag issues on driver 555 on the nvidia dev forum), I added nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0 to my GRUB_CMDLINE_DEFAULT_LINUX and rebuilt grub
A few other things:
- My system 13600k, nvidia 4070 super running arch linux
- Both firefox and chrome were running in wayland according to kwin debug console
- Kernel was rebuilt after switching drivers
- As stated above, added
nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0
Versions:
Nvidia-beta (utils-beta, and lib32-utils-beta are the same version aswell): 555.52.04-1
Plasma: 6.1.0
KWin: 6.1.0-3
KDE Frameworks: 6.3.0
Kernel: 6.9.6-arch-1
Graphics Platform: Wayland
I know that this is probably a race condition but I just wanted a sanity check before I go back to the 550 drivers. In all the posts hyping about explicit sync none of them said how to enable or check that it was enabled so I’m also just hoping that it would be enabled by default. Let me know if there are any logs I should provide.
TLDR: Native wayland applications stuttering after updating to Plasma 6.1 / Nvidia beta 555
Thank you for your time, and have a wonderful day 