Secondary Monitor has a weird stutter

After my last post, I still felt the call of Arch/EOS when I was experimenting with other distros. Sure, it’s hard mode, but it’s ownership of my computer and that’s the cost. I already broke things a few times, but fixed them! This new problem is hard for me to troubleshoot and I’m hoping someone can point me in a direction to look.

System specs at the end.

The problem is hard to describe. It’s not a true stutter as things are smoothish. It feels like there’s is 2-3 slowdowns within a second as I move windows across the monitor or scroll webpages up/down. Video doesn’t seem affected, I haven’t tried games on it.

My secondary monitor is set to 60hz, primary is 144hz. The problem persists even when primary is at 60/120/144/165hz, over reboots, dis/enabling it. The problem also persist when secondary is at 24hz/50hz.

Probably related, I had installed EOS under “default” KDE settings, when I installed Steam I kept Nouveau. When Baldur’s Gate 3 and Tabletop Sim refused to play nice, I found out that Nouveau is just a basic driver. I’ve replaced it with the proprietary nvidia drivers and how BG3, TTS, and now Helldivers 2 are working better than they ever were on Mint. Most of the troubleshooting threads say to check nvidia-settings which appears to be exclusive to X11.

Maybe??? related is that before I noticed this problem upon my second reboot after installing nvidia, my mouse would turn into this 2"x2" corrupted looking square whenever it was on the secondary. Dis/enabling the monitor make this go away.

leaf@Artemis

OS: EndeavourOS x86_64
Host: MS-7C56 (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 6.6.63-1-lts
Uptime: 10 hours, 19 mins
Packages: 1089 (pacman)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Display (DELD10F): 2560x1440 @ 144 Hz in 31" [External] *
Display (GN246HL): 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz in 24" [External]
DE: KDE Plasma 6.2.4
WM: KWin (Wayland)
WM Theme: Breeze
Theme: Breeze (Dark) [Qt], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
Icons: breeze-dark [Qt], breeze-dark [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: breeze (24px)
Terminal: konsole 24.8.3
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (16) @ 4.85 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
Memory: 7.15 GiB / 62.72 GiB (11%)
Swap: Disabled
Disk (/): 328.04 GiB / 1.21 TiB (26%) - ext4

Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GA102 [GeForce RTX 3080 Ti] vendor: eVga.com.
driver: nvidia v: 565.57.01 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 550.xx+
status: current (as of 2024-09; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Ampere code: GAxxx
process: TSMC n7 (7nm) built: 2020-2023 pcie: gen: 1 speed: 2.5 GT/s
lanes: 16 link-max: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s ports: active: none
off: DP-2,DP-3 empty: DP-1,HDMI-A-1 bus-ID: 2b:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:2208
class-ID: 0300
Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.14 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.4
compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: nvidia unloaded: modesetting
alternate: fbdev,nouveau,nv,vesa gpu: nvidia d-rect: 4480x2520
display-ID: 0
Monitor-1: DP-2 pos: bottom-l res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
Monitor-2: DP-3 pos: top-right res: 2560x1440 size: N/A modes: N/A
API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia device: 2
drv: swrast gbm: drv: nvidia surfaceless: drv: nvidia wayland: drv: nvidia
x11: drv: nvidia inactive: device-1
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 565.57.01
glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
memory: 11.72 GiB display-ID: :1.0
API: Vulkan v: 1.3.295 layers: 5 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu name: NVIDIA
GeForce RTX 3080 Ti driver: nvidia v: 565.57.01 device-ID: 10de:2208

new nvidia drivers will have all needed features enabled by default.
lsmod | grep nvidia
will show if this is the case for you.
But its not 100% true that settings to xorg will not apply to your wayland session on plasma…as once enabled wayland will take them over. And by default sddm (login manager) is running on x11 too…

Hi Joe, and thanks!

I rand the command and got this:

nvidia_drm 139264 193
nvidia_uvm 3829760 2
nvidia_modeset 1671168 61 nvidia_drm
video 77824 1 nvidia_modeset
nvidia 77524992 1115 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset

I assume that means everything’s working, but I don’t know what to do with this information.

Re: Xorg, the most of the troubleshooting I saw was dealing with nvidia-settings which looked to be explicitly for Xorg. Running the command anyway says it’s not installed, and the Arch wiki refers to a /etc/X11/xorg.conf that’ll be created if I run nvidia-settings. I’m brand new to Wayland and didn’t want to take this step yet without confirming that it’s good to do; I haven’t seen anywhere saying that’s so.

This sounds like a Wayland issue. It’s similar to what I experience on just one of my systems, with a Nvidia GPU, and dual monitors of differing resolution and refresh.

Are you able to replicate it if you log-out and log-in under an X11 session?

It looks like I didn’t have X11 on my system.

I just got home from Thanksgiving dinner and will be a bit before I can test that. I want to make sure I install Xorg the right way so I don’t bork the system again.

Sorry it took so long to get back! I came down with a nasty bug and then completely forgot about the thread.

I checked things out on X11. I don’t see this issue there so it seems it is a Wayland issue. I may just put up with because my gaming performance seems to be so much better without the screen tearing in Wayland.

I’m glad that appears to have resolved it for now.

In any case, I would recommend having X11 standing by as a backup option, even if you return to Wayland at some point. Just today, a mesa (OpenGL) update looks to have broken Wayland.

I saw! Another post I saw about that is what stirred the memory to reply back here. Thanks for the heads on it, but it thankfully doesn’t seem to affect me after I had a reboot.

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