Nvidia + Wayland, what is the issue?

Hi,

so this drives me nuts. I run a Fedora system with a 1070 NVIDIA GPU with the official NVIDIA driver and the last year I encountered multiple programs that had/have issues with rendering content:

  • One 2D video game where certain rendering layers were flickering (Unity engine),
  • FreeCad were the 3D view flickered and disappeared
  • The Slicer by Bambu labs. 3D View completely absent

The first 2 run fine now, the 3rd is a recent issue. All 3 seem to suffer from some deeper issue between the NVIDIA prop. driver with Wayland.

Being a software engineering I am curious what is going on here? Is the Linux rendering pipe so fragile? Does NVIDIA release untested stuff? Is the way how stuff is drawn on Linux so intertwined with the GPU driver that now clear separation of responsibilities is possible? I would like to know more about the problems we are facing here?

Thank you.

edit removed the last paragraph

I have no answer to your question on the Linux rendering pipeline - that term doesn’t mean much to me.

But I do have some curious questions that also won’t help you any. Does it work fine on X11? Have you narrowed it down to being a Wayland thing, for sure? Not a bug in your DE or some such? Does it work with software rendering?

Thx for pointing this out. In all 3 cases X11 worked, and for the slicer, software rendering is the current workaround(other people reported a driver downgrade worked as well). Thus I am confident that this is a Wayland/Nvidia thing.

I can work around these issues, but I am curious what is going on.

Gross, I have no idea how to effectively report a bug with Nvidia. Quite unfortunate if your error lands in proprietary software. Wonder if the open source drivers would work for your use case?

Seems like there are quite a few people just sticking to X11 for now.