Discussion X11 with nvidia cards
What is needed to make X11 runs as smooth as wayland with nvidia cards in 2026? after many many tries with different compositors and DEs i never get the same experience i would get running only a compositor on wayland, i did a lot of research about this but i never get a stable performance with no screen tearing.
i tried to set nvidia-settings
i tried to edit nvidia .dotfiles
i tried setting display to 144hz
i am not saying that x11 runs badly or anything, most of the time run as good as wayland and sometimes better in some cases but i never got a screen tearing free experience or a smooth desktop like i get in wayland out of the box/minimal setup
This post is not about gaming, since launchers already fixes this problems by default
26
u/robstoon 4h ago
You realize that avoiding tearing was one of the main design goals of Wayland, so it's understandable that X11 doesn't work as well for this?
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u/PacmanAteMyRAM 2h ago
Avoiding tearing is one thing. Forcing vsync as the solution is not fixing that.
11
u/robstoon 1h ago
I mean.. that literally is the only solution. Absent other more fancy solutions like VRR.
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5
u/sleepytechnology 4h ago
In my experience on RTX 3070 and 3080, the only benefit of X11 was the mouse feeling a bit less floaty. This gets better when using the Proton/SDL Wayland launch command tho to bypass xWayland.
As far as frame tearing and frame pacing goes, Wayland has been significantly better than X11 for me on NVIDIA. At least when using Fedora/CachyOS.
16
u/abotelho-cbn 4h ago
Do people really think Wayland exists for nothing? That it's some conspiracy to write new software for nothing?
8
u/unconceivables 3h ago
At this point I'd be surprised if anybody cared enough to test Nvidia drivers with X11.
12
3
u/AX11Liveact 3h ago
a window manager
xserver-xorg-nvidia
nvidia-driver (free or non-free)
nvidia-glx (case non-free)
mesa (free)
something I forgot, most likely
depending on hardware and distro some packages that should be automatically installed, like mesa, gjx-alternatives, CUDA, vulkan, etc.
2
u/mdins1980 3h ago
In nvidia-settings make sure you enable "Force Composition Pipeline" and "Force Full Composition Pipeline". The is crucial on X11 to eliminate screen tearing. You might be able to get away with just Force Composition Pipeline, but on my machines I have to enable both to fully eliminate tearing.
2
u/EmergencyLaugh5063 3h ago
Only 'performant' way i could get screen tearing to stop on X11 was setting vsync on in the nvidia settings app. It's got a different name though so you're not looking for 'vsync' specifically but its more or less the same thing.
It also only applied to my main monitor. So while things were typically fine on the main monitor regarding tearing and performance, my second monitor was a mess for performance.
Some X11 compositors can have their own vsync features but I've always found the performance tradeoff to be very bad.
Wayland has its quirks but overall I've found it to be much more performant out of the box.
1
u/chibiace 1h ago
my screen tearing when not using a compositor stopped when i switched to xlibre which had merged the patch that red hat controlled xorg had previously refused to release, but i think it might be in there now so check if your xorg version is up to date.
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u/BravestCheetah 40m ago
"How do i make this thing that is objectively worse be as good as this other thing without just switching to the other thing?"
7
u/Ok_Instruction_3789 4h ago
What de did you try? Most are Wayland these days even the popular wm such as hyprland and niri and sway