Flickering problems with NVIDIA GSYNC on Fedora 41 KDE Wayland

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1

Hi,

I’m trying to get my NVIDIA GPU to work in Fedora 41 KDE but I have a problem with GSYNC and I can’t find a solution. Looks like the only options right now are: get an AMD GPU, go back to X11 or quit trying to use Linux and stay with Windows.

RTX 4080
Fedora 41
Plasma 6.3.4
Wayland
Steam only, no native games
Latest open source 570 drivers (I did the swap akmod-nvidia thing)
Single GSYNC Compatible display, no GSYNC module, over Display Port (GSYNC doesn’t work over HDMI and I only get 100Hz refresh over HDMI instead of 144Hz)

Screenie-2025-04-09--13.37.17
Screenie-2025-04-09--13.37.17552×536 44.6 KB

Screenie-2025-04-09--13.35.18
Screenie-2025-04-09--13.35.18790×359 33.7 KB

Under the Display Configuration, there are three options for Adaptive Sync:

Never
Automatic
Always

Never - I don’t want this one obviously.

Automatic - this one is completely random, doesn’t work in games when wanted, kicks in when not wanted, in random apps, random windows, when taking a screenshots, etc., and causes bad flickering.

Always - flickers almost everywhere, desktop flickers, many apps flicker, but works properly in games.

I would have to manually switch between Never and Always every time I want to play a game, but then Alt-Tabbing out of game causes nauseating flickering so this option is not acceptable.

The NVIDIA Control Panel under Wayland is kind of joke. There are no settings of any sorts.

I tried X11 before, with older NVIDIA drivers. Under X11, the NVIDIA Control Panels has most of the expected features and GSYNC works properly. But it was a few months ago and I am not sure if I should bother with X11 any more since it’s no longer maintained.

So, is there some tweak to get this working under Wayland? I spent hours searching the web and it seems there is no solution other than waiting god knows how many years for NVIDIA or Wayland to get this right.

I know this could be because of the “GSYNC compatible” only display but it works fine in Windows, GSYNC kicks in only when needed and there is no flickering.

I also get random Plasma freezes and lockups and people in other threads also blamed NVIDIA drivers for that, no clue if that’s true.

My display supports Freesync but GPU prices are very bad right now and the recently released Radeon 9070XT apparently has some issues too in Linux and people advise waiting few months for the AMD drivers to catch up.

Thank you.

2

Sadly there’s no promise that switching to AMD will fix it for you either, my father and I have 7800XTs, we’re both running Fedora 41 KDE, but have different screens; both using HDMI. Adaptive Sync “Always” results in flickering on both our systems as the refresh rate cycles through the sync range, “Automatic” works just fine on his system but mine blacks out every time I Alt+Tab in or out of a program that triggers adaptive sync, it even happens when I toggle fullscreen on youtube.

As you can imagine it’s irritating in the extreme.

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3

Thank you! What a bummer. So there goes the hope that getting an AMD GPU would solve my problems :cry:

Yup, it’s irritating as heck.

So, it’s not just NVIDIA’s fault… it seems that Wayland may need another 16 years to get its act together. I’ve used GSYNC on Windows since it came out and it gave me very little issues over the years. It’s unusable on Linux and it’s one of the few things I can’t give up.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I really want to get out of Microsoftland but it seems less likely every day. There are just way too many issues with Linux. It’s been an uphill battle for several months.

4

You could try it out on Gnome, I did a bit of googling earlier and they have an experimental VRR implementation that can be enabled with a terminal command, I don’t know if it works any better than on KDE but all the complaints I’ve seen so far for this issue seem to be KDE systems.

5

Thank you but I can’t stand GNOME.

6

Understandable, I don’t like Gnome either, I might make a USB install of it though anyway just to see if this is a KDE thing or a broader one. Hopefully someone else here who knows rather more than me can provide or help get useful info.

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7

OK, so it looks like I’ve hit a wall.

I’ve spent more than a year testing all possible combinations of distros and desktop managers. Mint was my fav, briefly. Then I settled on Fedora with KDE as none of the other desktop managers worked for me and I liked the way KDE is integrated with Fedora. I tried other distros with KDE (Kubuntu, Cachy OS, Manjaro, etc.) and they all had kind of half baked Plasma implementation.

I’m gonna take a break now for some time, as I feel burnt out, and wait for Debian 13 as I doubt that Fedora 42 will change much. Debian 13 will come with the latest KDE Plasma. I tried the beta but it’s very unstable now. I’m more comfortable with the Debian side of things anyway as I run few Debian servers. But, honestly, my hopes are very low for Linux desktop.

Cheers!

8

Quick update, I followed through on installing Fedora Workstation 41 with the Gnome Desktop (Kernel 6.11.X) switched on the experimental Adaptive Sync and it behaved in the same way as “Automatic” on KDE - Blanks the screen as it switches on and off.

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9

Thank you. So, unfortunately, this seems to be an issue with Wayland in general.

Interestingly, I came across an article and some discussion (sorry, didn’t save the links) from late 2024, I think, about some Valve initiative to “fix Wayland”, as Valve seems to be fed up with Wayland’s glacial progress too, which is apparently mostly caused by internal politics and lack of reliable governance and decision making mechanisms (that’s what I gathered from it, I didn’t really spend too much time reading that as I kind of already gave up).

I don’t recall the details, it was fairly technical, something about “frog protocols”.

Seriously, Wayland was released a full year before Windows 7 came out, and it still can’t get basic things like VRR right. It’s actively (or passively?) hurting Linux adoption at this point.