PSA: Nvidia drivers 580 broke gaming on sway / wlroots for me
Gaming on Wayland, or more specifically sway WM, broke for me when updating to nvidia drivers version 580.
Reverting to 570 fixed the problem.
Card: Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti
What exactly happened: some games wouldn't launch at all (overwatch 2) while others had severe performance issues (Resident evil 5).
Those were the only two games I tried. Both ran through steam and Proton GE version 10.
Though I didn't test extensively, both games seemed to work fine on Xorg with nvidia drivers 580. So this confirms it's only problematic for Wayland.
580 driver dropped support for my graphics card and blocked it from running.
I play Helldivers 2 on my PC with 1660super and it works fine. I use Bazzite.
This is the way. Just recently I used Bazzite’s rollback/rebase feature to debug what turned out to be monitor firmware bug in Gsync triggered in very specific circumstances and not Nvidia drivers’ update. Shit’s lit.🔥
I recently upgraded from Linux Mint 21.3 to 22.2 and my login screen STILL shows the Wayland (Cinnamon) display manager as "experimental." Wayland runs a lot smoother on 22.2 and it's a lot less crash-ey, but I don't think it's ready for prime time, yet. (Your own mileage may vary.)
Ubuntu 25.10 + Wayland + Gnome 49 + Nvidia driver v580.95 (RTX 3070 Ti) works flawlessly for both gaming and normal apps.
Hey OP, can you try running a nested gamescope session to see if that fixes the issue? I usually always do this as a rule of thumb for all full screen applications due to the many QoL features like real Vsync.
Actually, can you even do that on Wayland yet, or is that Xorg-only?
Tbh I don't know what gamescope is, but I'll look into that and try it out to see. Thanks!
Any particular reason you're not on/tested the v590-branch? Of course it might be borked compared to 570, but might be worth a shot?
I thought about trying it out, didn't get to it yet. I will now. Thanks!
If you're using a custom WM, your experience is going to vary WRT to Steam/Proton being able to run properly.
What do you mean "custom WM"?
I've used Sway on arch, fedora and now nixOS, gaming / (AMD) GPU was never a problem. This seems an NVIDIA issue to me.
I wouldn't call sway a custom WM, it uses wlroots which has become a standard.
Though I agree that wlroots seem to vary significantly in results with gnome and KDE based Wayland.
seems to me like you made up your own non standard terminology?
There is no single standard DE on Linux. KDE and Gnome are the biggest ones, and most distros ship with flavors for either. So is KDE non-standard if I install it on regular Ubuntu (which ships with Gnome)? And besides, as the commenter above said, wlroots is one of the few big participants in deciding the wayland protocols, so they are most certainly standard, as standard as any wayland compositor.
Steam does not dictate what is standard on Linux. Just because they have not tested with this setup does not mean it isn't standard.
Dude...I'm not even eating my time with y'all who have zero clue as to how QA/CI/UAT works. It's such a waste of time.
Steam/Proton is only tested for KDE/GNOME, and that's it. Hands down. Not even up for fucking debate. It's a FACT.
You can read the docs, repos, GitHub Issues, forums, and everything else you want. That's the facts, and it's not going to change. Just because it's OSS doesn't mean they have all the time in the world to make sure your edge cases work FFS.
Classic Wayland. Fuck Nvidia tho