Arch Linux

notwill

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2

Screen artefacts when moving windows - Nvidia + Wayland

I’ve recently installed Arch, and have noticed frequent minor screen artefacts. Looks a little like screen tearing, but usually appears as thin lines (both horizontal and vertical) around the borders of where an overlaying app window was. This seems very intermittent, but I can consistently replicate screen artifacts when watching a YouTube video on Chrome.

Example apps:
- Steam
- Discord
- Chrome (YouTube)

I’ve tried disabling hardware acceleration on Discord, but this had no effect.

There are a few other visual problems happening:

- Some windows that were in the background or not visible change to the wrong resolution when opened, and don’t immediately go back. E.g Steam suddenly appears at a different resolution, although the window size the app is using does not change. Moving the window usually resolves this issue.
- This one I’m struggling to measure, but YouTube on Chrome *feels* slightly choppy. I’m not sure how to measure this, other than at a guess the frame rate is lower than I’m expecting vs other devices.

My setup:

- Arch installed via the arch installer
- Nvidia 4090
- Wayland
- KDE Plasma
- Nvidia driver installed via nvidia-dkm pacman package

I've also gone through the NVIDIA page on the ArchWiki and tried to complete the steps that seemed relevant for my driver.

Any help appreciated!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,052

Re: Screen artefacts when moving windows - Nvidia + Wayland

Do you use non 100% scaling factors? if you do and if your clients are using xwayland, the mechanism by which it applies scaling factors is not very well defined, there's a setting in plasma system settings where you can configure whether plasma should try to force a particular scaling factor on xwayland apps or whether it leaves that up to the applications, with differing results depending on the exact client.

All apps you mention will default to xwayland. particularly for chrome you will likely want to configure it to use the wayland backend for better general integration. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chromi … nd_support (speaking of which, any particular reason for chrome over chromium?)

if that helped and you want to try with discord as well:  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discor … _rendering

Afaik you can't yet switch steam, but I'm assuming that difference will be not as relevant since you're seldom overly actively interacting with it's window.

Last edited by V1del (Yesterday 15:31:34)

notwill

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2

Re: Screen artefacts when moving windows - Nvidia + Wayland

Thanks for the response!

Scaling factors - I've tried changing my display configuration to "Scaled by System", and I've tried with 100% scaling for my monitor, and I'm getting the same video artifacts when playing in Chrome. Double checked and Ozone is also using wayland.

I'm not currently getting the original screen artifacts (they were intermittent before, so I'll keep monitoring for them), although I am getting artifacts when playing video in Chrome. This is also occuring on another non-Youtube site, and I don't believe the video player is YouTube (although I guess it could be a reskinned version). The current artifact is seems to be limited to the bottom right corner of the screen. It looks a bit like it's interacting with a window behind (maybe a popup/notification), but there are none.

RE Chrome/Chromium - I have both installed, and happy to try Chromium if there's a reason to make a difference. I use Chrome as I use some of the logged in Google functionality.