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?
Plasma wayland has an automatic mode which should at least turn off VRR during desktop usage, as long as the application window isn’t fullscreen. A hacky way that can help when VRR is active is to increase the minimum frequency and kick into LFC more readily, by creating a custom EDID (you can also do a sysfs edit historically but I think that’s AMD only).
That’s only really viable if you have a high refresh rate monitor with a large range. I’ve found that 120hz may not be enough (since you may end up with gaps where VRR doesn’t work if the range is too narrow), which is of course the most common OLED TV refresh rate. In my experience a minimum of >=54hz minimises the flicker, but that may vary with the display.
There’s also an issue with cursors where moving the mouse can make the refresh jump to the maximum. It only affects desktop usage and some games (RTS and the like, not usually FPS camera usage). There are fixes coming for this with Plasma I believe, but I’m not sure about Gnome. Forcing a software cursor may help, as others have indicated.
Yeah I was exploring KDE on a Fedora live disc and I guessed that is what automatic vrr was doing. Turning it to always introduced more flicker but still seemed less then gnome.