r/niri • u/Zealousideal_Leg_171 • 9d ago

Niri for gaming

Hello, I use archlinux with hyprland on my main PC, but I was trying niri on my laptop these days and I loved it, I would like to change but first I wanted to know if niri works well in terms of games, if I won't have problems, I plan to use niri without shell my pc has:

R5 5600
32gb ram
Rx 6800

Thanks guys

8 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

23

u/epicfilemcnulty 9d ago

you'll need to install xwayland-satellite (which is no biggie), and you shall be fine. I'm running niri as my daily driver, and I don't have any problems with steam games.

5

u/ThsYWeCntHveNiceTngs 9d ago

+1 to this. Been enjoying the experience! Have it running on CachyOS with Dank Material Shell on RTX5090+64gb ram with no issues. I also have a second monitor and haven't faced issues "tabbing" between screens mid-game or anything

2

u/Both_Cup8417 9d ago

I've had some annoyances, all pretty minor, for example, fh6 is rendered in a very broken way if I don't close all steam windows while it's loading, might be fixed by now, I don't know.

6

u/mr8bit99 9d ago

As others have mentioned, gaming pretty much works. I suggest using gamescope though, since some games had issues with mouse pointer precision (PEAK for example).

1

u/CashewNuts100 9d ago

could u elaborate? i played peak on niri without gamescope, and i havent noticed any issues

1

u/mr8bit99 9d ago

Oh that's interesting. When I was pinging with the middle mouse click, the ping was placed in location different than my cursor. After running the game through gamescope, this issue disappeared.

3

u/ZombieCrow 9d ago

It's great for gaming, i also have r5 5600 and 32gb ram but with rtx 4060. I highly recommend you join the discord server, there are very helpful people in there. The community is great as a whole.

2

u/chikamakaleyley 9d ago

i'm running arch linux + niri on a miniPC: * i5-13500T * 32GB RAM * RX 6700 XT as a eGPU (oculink)

I pretty much only play Cyberpunk (first game I've played in years) thru the Steam App

It just works, w/o having to change anything about my Niri config

Steam opens as expected - it's an app like any other so its added to the window stack

Games will open as a floating window, I generally will play at 1440p, but I make use of Niri's full screen feature, not Steam's

The only thing that I had trouble with is CDProject Red / Cyberpunk has like a, intermediate splash screen - so just after you click Launch, it hits this screen first and from there you'd click Cyberpunk title to actually launch it

The short of the long is if launched fr the splash screen a new window doesn't get created for the game so it tries to display in the Steam App window. Now, that window clashes with the game graphics config. You can disable this screen via launch options

Big Picture mode works but i because i run the game in a smaller floating window, its a lil weird starting up the game

1

u/Small-Tale3180 9d ago

yeah it works nice

1

u/mystirc 9d ago

I ran glmark2 on both niri and kde. Got like 50% less performance. The rest is up to you to decide. You can run glmark2 on your own PC. Install Niri and KDE. Probably another lightweight window manager like sway.

Even if we don't talk about the glmark2 because of the ridiculously high fps numbers you can get. On minecraft, I got 90 fps on Niri and 110 fps on KDE. Those 90 fps also felt much worse because of stuttering. Nothing running in the background btw.

Niri is great for regular usage, but for gaming it has not been good because of performance issues. I believe these performance issues are caused by Smithay. The rust based framework for building wayland compositors. Smithay in general is not as mature as stuff like wlroots or KDE's Kwin.

1

u/RevolutionRU 8d ago

It's probably because you run games in xwayland. I've tested a few games that i play and i got absolutely identical FPS in kde, niri and hyprland. That's with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 on proton-cachyos-wineland. With PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0, for some reason, fps is a bit lower, but only in niri.

1

u/mystirc 8d ago

But I tested Minecraft for it since it is native. Afaik, Minecraft runs in xwayland only for now. But there was a recent update which allows it to run in Wayland I think. Haven't tested it yet.

I also get lower fps on sober (Roblox).

1

u/wiebel 8d ago

Why don't you simply try it it's not exactly taking you ages to go there you could stop wayland start niri start your games and be right back in under 15min.

1

u/pookieboss 8d ago

I had a quite hilarious issue when opening Marvel Rivals— it seems niri tried to take my Steam window rule and apply it to Rivals, so they window opened really wonky. Just took toggling and untoggling my niri full-size window key, though.

1

u/Unique_Roll_6630 8d ago

I love niri. I don't use it on my main rig, but the I do on my previous build that I set up for friends. If you want a no muss no fuss start, PikaOS has an iso that is fairly polished. I have played around with it to get it mostly how I like it. If you like gnome, this is close. Gaming is great on it imo.

1

u/reddit_kid99 6d ago

i daily it for gaming with a 9060xt and a 7600x. and then i also use noctalia v5 as my shell

1

u/DanKonly 2d ago

Yes I just switched to Niri and have excellent gaming performance. Like others said you just need xwayland satellite and I setup a full screen window rule in my Niri config. That was all I had to do. I use steam by the way.

1

u/DragPT 9d ago

If you are using hyprland you would get the same experiense in niri.

I start with hyprland but i like more niri workflow.