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Hello,
I am unsure where to post this, so if I instead should post in desktop environments let me know.
As of February 2025, I have two 4090 Nvidia cards driving three 144 Hz monitors and two 60 Hz monitors. All of them show a spanned desktop in KDE 6.
I am positing this, because since Wayland got started, I never got one more than one gpu to show a screen and Nvidia's official position was that it was not possible until they rewrote their closed driver. And since this is Arch, I hope this serves as a search result for other people.
I updated to KDE 6.1 (plasma) as well as the latest nvidia-open-dkms-570.86.16-2, and now all the screens show correctly, with correct refresh rates. And I have quite a complex setup:
KDE: 6.1
Kernel: 6.13.2
1st 4090: three 144Hz Monitors at 3840x2160 through displayport 1.4
2nd 4090: two 60 Hz Monitors one 1920x360 through hdmi 2.0 and another 3840x1100 both through displayport 1.4
KDE 6 has no issues, panels work, windows work, gaming through steam works (X11 would usually crash the non-144Hz screens)
Other compositors don't work, including Gnome and Hyprland. They do show the three main 144Hz screens, but not the others.
Thanks KDE team and Arch :D
A little bit more detail: Since Wayland was declared to be the successor of X11, it started from zero and had been slowly adding feature parity to X11. In any case, I used to work with multiple Nvidia GPUs and multiple screens in X11 all at the same time, it was super slow and buggy. As soon as Wayland was adopted, across Gnome, Plasma, and any other smaller compositor, like Pico and Hyprland, it was just not possible to have more than one GPU output a signal. You could output a second card signal through the first or the other way around, but not have output at the same time.
I think the main problem was the closed drivers, I am trying to search right now where I saw it, but, I think an Nvidia developer said the problem is that the driver has to supply more information to the compositor under Wayland protocols than X11, something that was missing.
As of 2024, you could physically have multiple GPUs and multiple screens, the compositors would detect the cards, the screens as well as the refresh rates, however, the second card would always output black screens, sometimes the cursor would be shown, but that was it. KDE is the first to fix this as far as I am aware.
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