I was recently lucky enough to buy an OLED monitor and it’s great. What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

Now all OLED monitors have a certain amount of VRR flicker, but I am comparing it to my Windows duel boot and it’s absolutely terrible under Gnome, like just a noticeable increase in the amount of flicker under both games and the desktop versus Windows. The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on “dynamic refresh rate”, which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time. I can turn on the refresh rate panel on my monitor and Gnome can fluctuate all over the place, even on the desktop, whereas Windows is steady at max refresh (again one I turn off dynamic refresh rate, which is a separate setting then VRR).

For games the flicker is way worse using proton under Wayland (which GE supports). Hunt Showdown - which I play a lot, looks incredibly flickery when vsync and Wayland are turned on, it basically has a strobing effect.

Anyone else seen this in action? Any suggestions for a fix? Should I swap over to KDE for a bit until Gnome gets this straightened out or will Plasma have the same problems?

  • ErableEreinte@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    Yes, I’ve been bothered by VRR flicker on my OLED monitor (LG 27GR95QE) since I started actively gaming on it with my Linux build a couple months ago, it was never an issue with consoles for me.
    I’m on KDE FWIW, and the flicker is more pronounced during games with mouse cursor on screen afaict. I can’t compare to Windows.
    I think VRR flicker is less of an issue when running games within a gamescope session, but it’s not ideal either.

    • Willem@kutsuya.devEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      If the issue is more prominent when the cursor is showing, it could be the hardware cursor (default on KDE) causing the issue. When you use hardware cursors, the cursor is rendered on a different ‘plane’ on top of the rest, possibly causing desync. You could try disabling it with a environment variable (I think it was KWIN_FORCE_SW_CURSOR=1), forcing to software render the cursor.

    • million@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Kind of a bummer to hear - I was hoping KDE’s VRR implementation might avoid the issue. It may be a Wayland problem so that would be unavoidable.

      Edit: did some testing with a live image tonight - at least on my machine KDE seems much better when it comes to flicker