this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Wayland, Freesync & 2 monitors - one not FS- compatible? (lemmy.fwgx.uk)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/linux_gaming
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I currently have a dual monitor setup of a Dell 24" and 27", neither are variable refresh rate. I think the 24" monitor is getting on for 17 years old and has had issues with lines on it when cold for the past 13 years. But it's my second monitor and once it's warmed up it's not too bad. Well I think the time has come to retire it and for my main 27" to become my secondary monitor and buy a new primary. I am interested in photography so accurate colours are important to me, which is why I bought these monitors in the first place. But I also play games, so something with some gaming features like Freesync and >60Hz refresh rates I also want. I've got my eye on a ASUS ROG Strix XG27ACS, fwiw.

I am running Endeavour OS (kernel 6.13.1) with KDE Plasma (6.2.5) on Wayland with a Radeon RX 5700 XT. My question is: Will my setup allow me to run one non-freesync monitor @60Hz and one Freesync monitor using the VRR at up to 180Hz. So I can get all the benefits of the new monitor when gaming, without having to turn the second monitor off?

I believe that if I just had the one monitor I'd have no issues and my setup would be plug and play. But as this has been a long time coming with many issues along the way to get VRR on linux working, I'm concerned that it's a "everything must support it or it won't work" scenario.

Grateful for your insights and advise.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Thank you to everyone who helped here. The monitor arrived this evening. Got it all setup with 2x 27" 1440 screens on arms connected over DP. KDE identified it straight away and ran at the full 180Hz with no configuration. Only thing I had to do was set the scaling to 100% instead of 125%. Played some Doom at a solid 180fps and it's really nice. Then some Metro Exodus where I get between 60 and 110, all looks lovely. The colours are pretty similar to my 27" Dell, but I haven't tried matching them 100% accurately.

Well done Linux devs for making this possible and easy.

PS, I should have had my second monitor on an arm years ago!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It works perfectly, I have a 60Hz, 144Hz VRR HDR, and 60Hz.

This is one of the use cases where Wayland shines compared to Xorg.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks. That fills me with a lot more confidence. Trigger pulled on the monitor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It works so well, if you stretch a window across more than one monitors of different refresh rates, it'll be able to vsync to all of them at once. I'm not sure if it'll VRR across multiple monitors at once, but it's definitely possible. Fullscreen on a single monitor definitely VRRs properly.

With my 60+144+60 setup and glxgears stretched across all of them, the framerate locks to something between like 215-235 as the monitors go in and out of sync with eachother, and none of them have any skips or tears. Some games get a little bit confused if the timing logic is tied to frame rate, but triple monitor Minecraft works great apart from the lack of FOV correction for the side monitors.

This is compositor dependent but I think most of the big compositors these days have it figured out. I'm on the latest KDE release with KWin.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It should work out of the box, make sure you turn on Adaptive Sync in Plasma's display settings to either "Automatic" or "Always"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Cool, thank you. I'm going to give it a shot then :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I don't run multiple monitors -- I'm in the "the monitor should be what's in front of the eyes, and if it's not showing useful stuff, then the software needs to be changed to deal with that" camp. So this isn't based on personal experience.

However, I strongly suspect, from what reading I've done and the degree of involvement that the compositor has in VRR support, that it's not just going to be Wayland, but also the compositor you use that's a factor.

kagis

This is three years old, but at least at that point, it sounds like Sway and Plasma supported it, and others did not.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/q40xff/are_kde_wayland_and_sway_the_only_options_for/

EDIT: Well, actually. Hmm. On second thought, I guess I do have a projector, and a head-mounted display, neither of which I think do VRR. Not sure if I've actually used them with my monitor when it had VRR enabled, though.

My real interest for VRR is for matching video framerates exactly. mpv requires a certain amount of user configuration, depending upon how you have it set up. Like, if you want top-quality non-VRR playback, you may want some settings required for frame interpolation, IIRC, and with VRR, you don't. So if you want to play back fullscreen videos on both monitors using both VRR and non-VRR using mpv, you might need to change config for them, at least.

[–] juipeltje 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

From my experience your mileage may vary when it comes to being able to keep both monitors on. The concept of a primary monitor on wayland doesn't exist, and my games always choose the wrong monitor to render on. The game will open on my primary monitor but i can only select the resolution and refreshrate of my secondary monitor in the game settings. If you have identical monitors that would probably not be an issue, but i don't. Setting the primary xwayland display with xrandr helps for some games, but not all. The best solution for me ended up being to disable my secondary monitor when gaming.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Thankfully I've not had that issue. It knows which is the main one and picks the right resolution even though one is 1440 and one 1200. Moving to 2x 1440 monitors should hopefully simplify things in that regard

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago

too bad systemd and wayland are in the same state as AAA games these days.