KDE's KWin Merges Wayland Explicit Sync Support

[erniv2]

Now that I've switched to Arc, things have been pretty nice.

Oh Bro i just ordered a arc a380 as my 2nd gpu we think alike , i want to start a proxmox project next and the arc card will be for the vm and nvidia for passtrough huhu, but then i need to trash my current setup

[Myownfriend]

Oh Bro i just ordered a arc a380 as my 2nd gpu we think alike , i want to start a proxmox project next and the arc card will be for the vm and nvidia for passtrough huhu, but then i need to trash my current setup

Yea I went for the A770 because it provides a lot of VRAM for the price and outperforms the 4060 for video editing. Unfortunately there's an issue where the preview in Davinci Resolve shows tiny and tiled so I have to switch to Windows to edit for now.

Apparently there's a way to flash some Arc cards with different firmware to enable SR-IOV. Have you looked into that at all?

[NeoMorpheus]

Well, i stand corrected in some points and the main one stays, ngreedia wins.

[Myownfriend]

Well, i stand corrected in some points and the main one stays, ngreedia wins.

There's no competition here though. Nobody is losing. Everyone gets explicit sync. Also Nvidia relented and supported DMA-buf, GBM, and GAMMA_LUT.

[You-]

For Nvidia users they will absolutely be getting earth shattering improvements, just not necessarily in performance. As someone who was using an Nvidia card up until about a month ago, I'd get frequent rendering issues and in the case of XWayland applications, flickering issues. It actually wasn't that bad for awhile but got worse recently because Nvidia made an optimization in their driver that wound up making the flickering issue much worse. Steam used to show garbled and quickly flickering graphics in its Store page and parts of the Davinci Resolve interface would flicker black every time I moved the mouse.

With explicit sync, those should all be fixed. I'm sure there will still be other issues to fix after that but it should still be a huge step towards parity with other drivers.

There is a big "should" in that post. I hope it works that way but I wouldn't put as much faith in nvidia fixing its issues as you have.

First EGLStreams would fix the issues. Then the move to gbm would finally fix the issues. Now it is Explicit Sync.

Now, I am not even suggesting all the above is contradictory, each may be a step in improving support, but there is the possibility that moving to explicit sync will then expose the next big nvidia weakness stopping Wayland (or other things) working properly instead of being the solution to all nvidia users problems.

[Myownfriend]

Now, I am not even suggesting all the above is contradictory, each may be a step in improving support, but there is the possibility that moving to explicit sync will then expose the next big nvidia weakness stopping Wayland (or other things) working properly instead of being the solution to all nvidia users problems.

I don't think EGLStreams was every looked at as a solution to anything. Nvidia created it and were the only ones who supported it. Everything else did provide huge improvements to the experience though. Before they supported DMA-buf, there was no hardware acceleration for XWayland applications. Then when GBM was supported, things like Firefox's Webrender would finally work, Plasma Wayland sessions finally worked well, and there's a few other things I immediately noticed by they're slipping my mind.

What explicit sync will definitely fix for Wayland on Nvidia is that flickering I mentioned. I remember back when Cemu (the Wii U emulator) didn't support Linux yet, I would run it via Wine so it was basically DWM->X11->Wayland and that made the syncing issues more obvious. You could see the frames being displayed in the wrong order. I believe that as before Nvidia supported GBM, too.

But I agree that it probably won't fix everything. I imagine issues with screen capture performance will persist for example but going from flickery mess to not is pretty huge.

[theriddick]

Once again, FOSS community bends over for ngreedia…

While true. Explicit Sync had to happen. Just like HDR had to happen for Linux to move on with adopting long standing features most desktop users are very use to using under Windows. Linux can't just throw out every power user feature windows users use for their own technology, doesn't work like that. Not even for Apple (thought they do TRY to, and fail)

[Alexmitter]

Great, now imagine if the Wayland folks listened to Nvidia 10 years and supported superior EGLStreams instead of sticking to shitty GBM. Wayland could’ve taken way less than 16 years to be adopted. Lol

EGLStreams do not work for wayland, and Nvidia knew from the beginning. This is not about GBM being build around implicit sync, this is about EGLStreams not matching the needs at all. They even admitted it and announced to build a actually superior solution with the community, and then developed their GBM backend as they realized its not actually gonna have real world benefits over GBM.

[Steffo]

Once again, FOSS community bends over for ngreedia…

It bends to a better solution.

[darkbasic]

For all those who can't wait to use it, there is a backport patch for the 6.0 branch as well: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-..._requests/5511

The article just mentioned that mesa support for explicit sync hit in Mesa 24.1. The catch is that it's only the Vulkan windowing API that supports it so... afaik Gnome is the only compositor with a shipped Vulkan backend, and they consider it super experimental.

What's the point of the 6.0 backport if Plasma neeeds a Vulkan backend in order to take advantage of it?