Hi all,
I hope you all are doing well. For reference, I am using KDE Plasma and running my games with the most recent proton-cachyos-slr through Steam. Both my CPU and GPU are from AMD.
After I added a second monitor to my setup, I started having an issue in certain games where my display is not refreshing even though the internal frame rate is still very high. I suspect that the entire desktop environment is freezing because even if I do something like alt+tab or press the meta key, the display doesn’t update until the game catches back up, which might take 15 seconds or more. I can tell that my GPU is still rendering frames because if I use either MangoHUD or the steam fps counter, according to those tools, there was never a frame dip, but visually the entire system freezes for an extended period of time. Moreover, if I give an input with mouse or keyboard, I can hear the game audio, which does not freeze, respond to my input. For example if I fire my gun, I can hear it like normal despite the frozen screen.
I’ve read in various other places that Wayland can have issues handling multi-monitor setups where the two monitors have different refresh rates. Both of my monitors are 2560x1440p, but the primary one is 280hz and the secondary one is 180hz. So far I’ve tried a couple different things, including messing with the variable refresh rate settings within KDE Plasma and VSync in game or changing the Proton version I’m using to proton-ge or the Valve release, but the primary fixes I’ve tried have been with Steam launch options. I tried using PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command% to bypass Xwayland as well as gamescope -w 2560 -h 1440 -W 2560 -H 1440 to run the game in its own sandbox environment rendered to the native resolution of my monitor. Both of these seem to help (reduce the frequency of freezes), but not entirely eliminate my issue. Moreover they don’t seem compatible with each other (can’t use both at once).
The main games that I have issues with this are Marvel Rivals, Deadlock, and Helldivers 2. Most other games I’ve played don’t seem to have any issues at all, namely Cyberpunk 2077, Rocket League, and Warhammer 40000: Darktide, which run great. This makes me suspect that it might also have something to do with anticheat systems, though Darktide and Rocket League don’t seem to have the same issue. I’ve also been running a native Linux version of Minecraft through Prism launcher that doesn’t have this issue.
I really don’t want to just not use the second monitor. I spent money on it and to just unplug it seems like a waste of a resource. And I just really like it so I want to keep it in my setup. I tend to use the second monitor for video calls with my friends while we play together. I do think I’ve narrowed the issue down to being something to do with Wayland, though if I’m wrong then I’m open to that. The final other technical piece of context that I think might be relevant is that both monitors are using DisplayPort. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Or am I just F’ed until Wayland gets updated for better support with multiple monitors?
I’m happy to provide additional information if anything is missing, please let me know if any other context will help troubleshoot this. Thank you!