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.
Which distribution? Maybe its an issue with the packaging. 580 is the last version that supports the older 10xx cards and there were some packaging changes in Archlinux. Now your card is newer than that and should not be affected. But maybe your distribution made some changes to packaging that caused the issue?
It’s Gentoo. That could be possible, maybe something to do with the open vs non-open variant. I will look into it.
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.
Classic Wayland. Fuck Nvidia tho
How do you know its a Wayland issue? Edit: I mean its not the entirely same setup, because Sway WM does not run on Xorg. That means there are other differences in play than Wayland only.
You’re right of course - it could be a Sway issue, but with Sway being engineered from the ground up to be a Wayland compositor, and conforming to that design, I would still blame Wayland.
To give a comparison: NTFS has many annoying flaws and limitations, but because it’s ultimately a file system created for the NT kernel on Windows, I blame Windows for its limitations.
Besides common sense would suggest that usually when it comes to launching games a display protocol would have more impact than a choice of WM, though Wayland blurs that line because of it’s unusual architecture compared to what we know and love with the X11 protocol and good old Xorg…
It doesn’t even need to be Sways issue. What I mean are secondary issues like packaging of Sway or related packaged that are used when using Sway or Wayland. It doesn’t need to be a Wayland issue in itself. I just had in the past issues and quickly blamed something and it turned out something different.
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?
Gamescope works on Wayland too nowadays.
Tbh I don’t know what gamescope is, but I’ll look into that and try it out to see. Thanks!
Gamescope is developed by Valve and used in Steam Deck. But you can install it on any system. You can think of it as a commandline application, to run games with. It can fix issues you or give some options and should make games run better if they are problematic otherwise.
If you’re using a custom WM, your experience is going to vary WRT to Steam/Proton being able to run properly.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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!
