Since nvidia drivers do not properly implement implicit sync, this protocol not existing is the root cause of flickering with nvidia graphics on Wayland. This MR being merged means that Wayland might finally be usable with nvidia graphics with the next driver release.
EDIT: Nvidia dev posted that support is planned in the 555 driver, with beta release planned for May 15: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/pull/104#issuecomment-2010292221
AFAIK we still need this merge request here for it to actually affect 99% of games, because they all run with Xwayland, right? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967
We also need support for the new protocol in Nvidia’s driver. Support will be available in driver 555, the beta of which will be released on May 15. So there’s still some time to wait until it’s fully fixed.
Currently yes, tho Wine has gotten pretty far with Wayland support, so it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Wine Wayland be useable for gaming in the next year or two.
Yes, but that’s bound to be merged quickly, the protocol itself was the main holdup from what I understand.
Questions from someone still on xmonad/x11, with 3 computers that have nvidia cards:
Do all nvidia cards have trouble in wayland currently, or is it just some subset?
Is it really unususable, or just really annoyingly flickery?
Would my card be usable now (without this merge) if I was using the nouveau driver?
Once this is merged, will all nvidia cards work in wayland? Or do we not really know yet.
Nouveau should have already been fine, this should fix the proprietary driver’s issues. AFAIK this is a core issue of the proprietary driver, so should affect all cards.
I tried Wayland on my 16xx series GPU, Electron apps were only annoying, but games were unplayable. The desktop itself and Wayland native apps worked fine, though.
The root cause of Nvidia flicker is Nvidia ecosystem being a total shitshow. This has nothing to do with drivers and how bad they are, or how Nvidia refuses to open source even the base of their desktop card drivers, or that the few tools they contribute to in in the OSS space to work around that are awful, or that the entire Linux environment for Nvidia is all about the datacenter (what an insane mess that is).
Good luck Nvidia+Linux fanboys.
Well, this is the root cause of this specific issue if you treat nvidia’s part of the stack as some barely changable black box (which is what it is right now). It’s not that I disagree open source drivers would be better, I just already own an nvidia GPU :/
Sure, I agree, but Nvidia proprietary driver is still the best for gaming, isn’t it?