I’m not super familiar with the differences between x11 and Wayland, but I’ve been experiencing some screen tearing in games with x11 that I don’t remember experiencing in the past. I’ve heard Wayland is more performant, but does that mean anything when gaming?
I am using an AMD gpu with just out-of-the-box settings. No additional drivers or tinkering.
Are you using multiple monitors? With X11 multi-monitor setups one of the monitors always tears if the framerate aren’t multiples of each other (e.g. 120Hz + 60Hz works fine, 144Hz + 60Hz results in tearing with one of them). This is also the case with variable refresh rate (FreeSync), but VRR shouldn’t be an issue as it’s not enabled by default on X11 iirc.
You’d have to manually enable Wayland, because PopOS disables it by default (does not show in the login menu/GDM). Keep in mind that PopOS is based on Ubuntu 22.04, which is quite old at this point. Wayland might not be as good of an experience for you because lots of improvements happened over the last two years.
PopOS will release their new COSMIC wayland desktop environment with updated packages in a few months, which should work well for gaming and fix your tearing issues.
If you want to try whether Gnome Wayland solves your issue, you can edit
/etc/gdm3/custom.confand setWaylandEnable=true. After a reboot you should be able to select Wayland in the bottom right corner at login.If everyone in the tux community was nice as you were here we would be miles ahead. Thanks
Awesome, this was super helpful! I was using multiple monitors, so that may have been my issue, but actually just decided to go back to one the week. I haven’t had much gaming time this week, so I’ll see if the tearing is resolved.
Super excited for COSMIC!! I probably won’t upgrade right away, but the progress has looked awesome.
@Chewy7324 @chris
That helped me too,Thanks!
Eventually. For now x11 is still here, but is slowly being left behind.
