Bummer - sucks to lose a good server

What happened? Did the instance maintainer just get sick of running it?

For posterity’s sake here is what I ended doing.

• I reinstalled Bazzite and switched over to KDE variant
• Flicker seems a lot better then Gnome under KDE, especially at the desktop level
• In the games I have tested, flicker still feels more prominent then Windows 11 - mostly noticeable in HDR games with fluctuating framerates and in menus (even if that menu has stable frame rate)
• Flicker patterns are different under KDE then Gnome, some games has less flicker, some more, overall an improvement

HDR is working well under KDE, the Wayland mode in GE Proton introduces a big performance hit in some games unfortunately.

Yeah I was exploring KDE on a Fedora live disc and I guessed that is what automatic vrr was doing. Turning it to always introduced more flicker but still seemed less then gnome.

It’s way worse if I run games under the experimental Wayland mode that you enable with GE.

What distro are you using? I am on Bazzite

https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesX/comments/t3fn6l/can_someone_explain_vrr_like_im_5_what_it_does/

Ok, so let’s say your tv is a typical 60hz TV, that means it updates 60 times a second, regardless of the games frame rate. A 60fps game will be in perfect sync with your TV, as will 30fps because each frame will just be displayed twice. When your game is running at a frame rate in between it’s not in sync with the display any more and you end up with screen tearing, as the image being sent to the TV changes part way through the image being displayed.

VRR stands for Variable a refresh Rate. It basically means the displays refresh rate can vary to match the source of the image, so that it always stays in sync.

This a pretty good explanation of what VRR is doing. Basically makes it so you can drop frames and it still feels smooth.

Kind of a bummer to hear - I was hoping KDE’s VRR implementation might avoid the issue. It may be a Wayland problem so that would be unavoidable.

Edit: did some testing with a live image tonight - at least on my machine KDE seems much better when it comes to flicker

I had the name wrong initially - I just edited it to correct it, but under Windows “dynamic refresh rate” - is distinct then VRR. Settings reads “To help save power, Windows adjusts the refresh rate up the selected rate above”. See https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/29/22555295/microsoft-windows-11-dynamic-refresh-rate-laptops.

I can turn it off and still have VRR enabled.

Trust me when I say the amount of OLED flicker is much much higher in Gnome then under Windows for the exact same games. Like give you eye strain and a headache super fast. I still see a little flicker under Windows but it’s not comparable.

TIL I had no idea you could untick compatibility and some games would auto-run with a Valve selected Proton version

Actually on Tumbleweed right now. I’ve been generally impressed but my suspend broke out of no where and it’s the latest in a long line of (mostly) minor things breaking with updates. The upside with how fast the updates are is that usually things are fixed as quickly as they break but suspend has been broken for me for about 3 weeks now.

I honestly just don’t think rolling distros are for me. Or at least, not for my use case of chill out during my downtime and play a game PC.

Right now I am pretty frustrated with HDR under Linux. Well frustrated may be the wrong word, but it is the thing right now that gets me to boot into Windows to play games that have HDR.

I am wondering if I would have more luck using the deck variant for HDR because apparently Valve has this figured out before everyone else.

Kind of the boat I am in.

Just want my gaming desktop to work and be stable. Or at least more stable then my current rolling release, Tumbleweed.

I do have an AMD GPU, so that sounds like it will make things easier.

Are you running the -deck variant that gives you a Steam deck experience that has a DE for “desktop mode” or just the version with a more traditional DE?

I had a pretty bad experience with Nobara where KDE was super unstable. Probably hardware specific, but when I switched off it everything was stable.

GPU is Radeon 7900xtx, so pretty new.

I may switch back to distro Steam. I was trying to get as much Flatpaked as possible but getting HDR working is more important to me.

Yeah I was running the game under Plasma 6 with HDR enabled and inside a game scope container.

Sounds like there are some issues with Flatpak and HDR so that may be what I am hitting.

What additional configuration are you referring to?

I got it to engage, the game thinks it’s running in HDR but it just looks really bad

Ah - thanks for the heads up about the Flatpak version. I have everything running in Flatpak, Steam as well, so that may be why I’ve had zero luck with HDR.

Got it working, added to -f --hdr-enabled to the Additional Options section under the upscale options in the Gamescope tab. Note that you need to have upscape ticked even with additional options added.

Unfortunately it looks washed out and awful.

Edit: Just a quick note for folks this later on - it does indeed seem Flatpak related, or at the very least I got similar results under the Steam flatpak trying to run game in HDR. I ended installing the native package Steam and lo and behold, HDR no longer looks as washed out, though it still looks a little off compared to Windows. Those swapchains errors I was getting also vanish.

I wouldn’t have thought to try that, thanks. Can confirm it looks like it is running Gamescope now. However I am still not getting an HDR switch in Alan Wake 2.

Getting the following errors:

“CreateSwapchainKHR: Creating swapchain for non-Gamescope swapchain. Hooking has failed somewhere! You may have a bad Vulkan layer interfering. Press OK to try to power through this error, or Cancel to stop.”

“QueuePresentKHR: Attempting to present to a non-hooked swapchain. Hooking has failed somewhere! You may have a bad Vulkan layer interfering. Press OK to try to power through this error, or Cancel to stop.”