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?
Right. What I’m saying is that the benefit that VRR provides falls off as monitor refresh rate increases. From your link:
If you have a 60 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame goes to a static refresh rate screen is 1/60th of a second.
But if you have a 240 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame is sent to a static refresh rate screen is 1/240th of a second.
OLED monitors have no meaningful framerate physical constraints from the LED elements on refresh rate; that traditionally comes from the LCD elements (well, I mean, you could have higher rates, but the LCD elements can only respond so quickly). If the controller and the display protocol can handle it, an OLED monitor can basically display at whatever rate you want. So OLED monitors out there tend to support pretty good refresh rates.
Looking at Amazon, my first page of OLED monitor results has all capable of 240Hz or 480Hz, except for one at 140 Hz.
That doesn’t mean that there is zero latency, but it’s getting pretty small.
Doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to VRR, just that it declines as the refresh rate rises.
Reason I bring it up is because I’d been looking at OLED monitors recently myself, and the VRR brightness issues with current OLED display controllers was one of the main concerns that I had (well, that and burn-in potential) and I’d decided that if I were going to get an OLED monitor before the display controller situation changes WRT VRR, I’d just run at a high static refresh rate.
Just having VSync on can introduce frame pacing issues. It’s just not an issue if you can maintain the monitor refresh rate consistently, of course. And you can turn it off altogether if you can tolerate tearing.
But that’s the main benefit of VRR for me which is frame pacing at sub monitor refresh rate, rather than latency reduction compared to the various types of VSync.