First of all, I’m sorry for the terrible external source picture below, but that was the only way I could find to register the issue I am facing as both Gnome screenshot and screen record tools can’t “see” the problem: since the update to the 530.x.x Nvidia driver fullscreen games are displayed like that only on Wayland sessions. I’ve been searching online to see if someone else reports this issue, but nothing so far, so I am doing it now. Also, since this is probably a problem with Nvidia at least in part, I don’t expect to solve it without a future driver update, but I just wanted to know if someone else faced something similar (I mean, if it was a common issue I would have find something about it online at this point).
Curious things about this phenomenon:
Only happens on Wayland + Gnome 43 and above. It’s fine on both Plasma and Hyprland sessions. Also doesn’t happen on Gnome X11. That excludes the possibility with problems with the actual screen.
Launching games on borderless window mode “fixes” it.
Happens on clean installs: i.e., without the nvidia modeset parameters being set.
As said before, the artifacts can’t be captured via screenshot or screen recording. Both will show the screen normally as if nothing was wrong.
Tested with native Steam, Steam flatpak, different versions of Proton, experimental, GE. It doesn’t matter. Still happens all the time.
Sad because my experience with Gnome + Nvidia + Wayland (yeah, I know), probably the trio of “asking for problems” nowadays, was amazing up to this point.
I saw a video the other day talking about x11 having better gaming performance than Wayland at this point, so if it was me, I would switch to x11 to play games anyway. That being said, I have yet to have a very good experience at all with Wayland to this point with my Nvidia GPU, so I kinda just avoid it outside of trying it every so often just out of curiosity but that never last long before something doesn’t act right, and I just switch back to x11.
Surprisingly, Wayland has been working fine for me up until the Nvidia driver update. Guess we can’t get new features without breaking previous ones, but well. Besides having to manually tweak to make suspend work (which is a problem with Nvidia), everything just worked, including games. Desktop performance itself is considerably smoother and for games I could, for example, run Nioh which was a game that I could never get rid of screen tearing on a X11 session before. I’m trying my best to leave X11 since I feel that this change is coming sooner than later whether we like it or not. I might have to use Hyprland for that since Gnome is another source of problems, but these things take too much time to configure. I don’t know if I have the patience anymore .
I plan to do the same. I just updated the cpu, MB, and ram in preparation for going to a newer amd gpu from my old gtx 970. (That being said it seems my fx8320 was holding my gtx 970 back a bit because I am getting much better performance in games just from that change alone.)
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