Neat little thing I just noticed, might be known but I never head of it before: apparently, a Wayland window can vsync to at least 3 monitors with different refresh rates at the same time.
I have 3 monitors, at 60 Hz, 144 Hz, and 60 Hz from left to right. I was using glxgears to test something, and noticed when I put the window between the monitors, it’ll sync to a weird refresh rate of about 193 fps. I stretched it to span all 3 monitors, and it locked at about 243 fps. It seems to oscillate between 242.5 and 243.5 gradually back and forth. So apparently, it’s mixing the vsync signals together and ensuring every monitor’s got a fresh frame while sharing frames when the vsyncs line up.
I knew Wayland was big on “every frame is perfect”, but I didn’t expect that to work even across 3 monitors at once! We’ve come a long, long way in the graphics stack. I expected it to sync to the 144Hz monitor and just tear or hiccup on the other ones.
TL;DR Wayland is good
That’s actually one of the oldest features I wanted out of Wayland. Its the reason why I don’t have a second monitor since 10 years, as X cannot deal with this stuff correctly, especially when G-Sync an other modules are involved. I switched to Wayland last year and plan on buying a second monitor soon. All of them should be handled separately and correctly.
BTW good to know that it works this well. I imagine its AMD GPUs. Not sure if this works well under Nvidia yet, but its another reason why I switched to AMD (because this allowed me to use Wayland without tears).
Not sure if I can easily test VRR as it only works on fullscreen windows, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Yes this is AMD, KWin 6.0.5 with the explicit sync patch for the compositor. There’s a chance this works fine with NVIDIA too since they have to implement the same interfaces as everyone else.
Nvidia on Wayland is still broken to a degree. They still wait for the new updated driver with specific Wayland fixes for VSync issues. And I mean normal Vsync, not even VRR. Its not at the same level as AMD at the moment.
And it depends which window management and compositor you are using, as not all of them are fully functional like KDE. Actually, I switched to KDE+AMD because of the better Wayland support.
On KDE you can force VRR for non-fullscreen apps by setting Adaptive Sync to “Always” in Display settings
Super apparent performance on my ancient Chromebook with barely any resources. Beautiful animations that make it look like a modern laptop, well, until ram runs out. It can run about 3x as much stuff compared to stock ChromeOS. Love this with Pipewire, Linux a/v is honestly better than both osx and windows now and I’m so impressed. Can even do pro audio type stuff where you route the a/v from one app to another. It’s worth losing all the network ability that X11 has
Yeah, also pretty excited about PipeWire, the video stuff opens a ton of doors for OBS and broadcasting in general on Linux.
It’s worth losing all the network ability that X11 has
Waypipe is pretty good, can totally watch YouTube over SSH into a VM. It uses video codecs for compression, so in theory it can probably even get extended into game streaming. Probably not so great on low bandwidth environments but it’s not like modern apps use Xlib anyway, it’s all rendered by the client.
DEs are also implementing compositor level RDP support, which brings in a ton of room for properly optimizing remote access.
Yeah I mean it’s still kinda cool. X protocol is vector based iirc, and you can just set up xauth and use ssh -X to forward windows over ssh
Anyway I’m sure this doesn’t matter today, and the performance sucks for typical use
This setup isn’t what I use, i had wanted to try as many monitors that i had ports for and this was one result that worked.
2 Sharp 18" tv’s at 60Hz, different models and one can’t do higher than 1280x720p so it was scaled 125%
LG ultrawide 34" 100hz
Asus 27" 75Hz
Samsung 42" tv scaled to 75% but I couldn’t get its refresh rate to change. it’s supposed to do 120Hz but i only get 60 Hz
since switching to wayland, i rarely have monitor problems and i love it, especially after switching to an AMD GPU. i had constant issues from my previous nvidia card.
side note, i’m super poor and all of these except the LG were given to me by friends who no longer had use for them. many of these friends do website design and ask me how their sites look occasionally. they can emulate different screens i think but they’re probably trying to show off or they know i have a huge variety of screens i can test things with. I have at least 6 other monitors from 4 different brands in 3 sizes and 3 different native resolutions with 2 that do rates other than 60Hz. two are CRT’s. now i’m probably trying to show off.
