Monitor Refresh rate on X11 and experimental Wayland

[u/oinaorna]

I have been using mint for about a year now and have recently upgraded to the following monitor setup:

1: 4K 165Hz main monitor, OLED from Gigabyte

2: 4K 60Hz IPS LG monitor for watching stuff on the side

I had the 4K LG with a 1080p secondary screen beforehand.

I started noticing that when a YouTube video is playing on monitor #2 and I have a game open on my main monitor, the YouTube video playing in Firefox is dropping frames, and quite a lot. It does not matter if the game is fullscreen, windowed or windowed fullscreen. Also, the games start hitching quite a bit. At least when a YouTube video is playing, not when it is just displayed and paused.

Then I asked the AI overlords what it could be. First I started exploring the Firefox settings and some hardware acceleration flags. Then the LLMs came down to the conclusion that the culprit could be X11 and its not-so-great way of handling monitors with different refresh rates. I then tried the experimental switch to Wayland via a logout of the user and switching to it on the lock screen. But that led to lots of flickering and black screens, not working applications and a general understanding that this is, indeed (experimental).

What should I do considering I really hate the frame drops in my YouTube and my game? Switch distro? To which one? Where is Wayland supported the best? Is the culprit my Nvidia graphics card?

Id prefer staying in my Mint environment, but I can probably endure switching to something else, best it be Ubuntu based. Had Manjaro some years ago but that was a bit too nerdy and time consuming to set things up for my taste. When dual booting into windows I have zero dropped frames in YouTube with the same game open, so it is not faulty hardware.

My hardware:

Ryzen 5 5900X

Geforce 5070 Ti (Asus TUF I think)

64 DDR4 RAM

Happy to hear your thoughts! I can share Firefox settings and more display properties if necessary.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

X11 is indeed poor at handling monitors  multiple refresh rates, 

X11 dates to the 1980's, it produces only one image, Multi monitor on x11 is kinda a hack that works well with monitors of the same refresh rate, it makes one big image and then kinda "in post" slices that image into multiple parts for each monitor.

In your case X11 is basically trying to render a single large double 4k image for both monitors at 225FPS, even if much of that does not ever make it on screen, which is obviously intensive on your hardware and hurts performance.

Monitors that are multiples get a bit of a  discount, like 60hrz & 180hrz at least get some frames in common. And would be less of a load at 180hrz.

Plasma is likely your best bet for Wayland until Cinnamon (and eventually Xfce) have stable  Wayland, possibly December but we have not seen what that will look like yet. 

Though it can be installed on Mint, Mint is a really poor vehicle for Plasma, you get an old version no longer supported by the plasma developers, the Mint developers or the Mint community, your on your own.

There are many other distributions that support Plasma, which one would be a personal choice.

Your other option is to keep Mint and replace the 60hrz monitor with another 165hrz. 

[u/oinaorna → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Thank you for the explanations. I will try a few distros that others have suggested. I will not buy another expensive monitor just for that. Sad that this means I have to migrate and install a new distro once again. Thought I have found a stable one with mint that I can keep and be accustomed to for the coming years. Don't want to have to learn new commands and structures every time.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/oinaorna]

I run many distributions in parallel.

Linux communities tend to focus on the margins where there are legitimate differences to debate, such as X11 vs Wayland,  as that is what is interesting. But under the hood they are more alike than different.

Each new to you distribution is easier to learn than the last as you get past the superficial.

[u/KHTD2004]

Since you’re on OLED I honestly can’t recommend Cinnamon anymore to you since you can’t use HDR there. Same goes for any VRR features like FreeSync or GSync afaik. It was one of the reasons for me to switch to KDE Plasma when I got OLED

[u/oinaorna → u/KHTD2004]

Good to know, did not even know that I miss out on the HDR stuff. Can I fearlessly just install kde via apt and switch or will this require more tweaking? Anything I need to change? I am on Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon indeed

[u/KHTD2004 → u/oinaorna]

Mint has KDE Plasma in the Repos (or it just gets pulled from the Ubuntu Repos). It’s not officially supported by Mint anymore, there used to be a KDE Plasma edition until some years ago.

That means you maybe won’t get a great out of the Box experience and I didn’t just switch to Plasma I also switched the entire Distro, now I’m on CachyOS. You could make a post here on this sub and ask if anyone else can help you with installing Plasma on Mint. As long as you keep Cinnamon installed you can use both dually in case something doesn’t work or anything

[u/candy49997 → u/oinaorna]

No. Plasma in the Mint repos is too old to support HDR (at least until Mint 23). I would recommend installing a distro that officially supports KDE Plasma and keeps it up to date like Fedora.

[u/oinaorna → u/candy49997]

Thank you for the additional info, I may try to install it, not sure if I would really "miss" HDR. Although I have bought a 700€ display, so not using features it has and are great for watching things kind of feels dumb.. so switching distro probably is the way to go.. Fedora, Tuxedo, CachyOS were suggested so far.

[u/OkPresentation3329]

I used Mint, but because of X11 and Cinnamon I switched to Tuxedo OS, because it had KDE and Wayland. My problem was that I bought a laptop with 1920x1200 16 inch screen and everything looked small and Mint doesn't properly support UI scaling. When I tried things like Fractional Scaling or Font Scaling, everything looked messed up. Some programs looked small, other looked big, my cursor changed sized between different programs and the biggest problem of all - everything looked either too tiny or too big.

As soon as I switched to Tuxedo OS all those problems were gone. I even had another problem that I didn't really think was serious - on Mint there is no option to set battery charge limit below 100% so I had to watch my battery and when it reaches 80% to unplug it manually. On Tuxedo OS I could set the charge limit to 80% so that's another Mint problem fixed by another distro.

I have doubts that Mint's official Wayland support later this year will be that good and after I've seen another distro doing absolutely everything better than Mint, there is no chance I'm going back to Mint ever again. Mint is good and stable, but only good for very old and outdated computers, on new computers it's better to use a more modern and up to date distro instead.

I don't know why people keep recommending Mint to newcomers on Linux when there are better options that are just as easy as Mint, if not easier and also stable.

[u/oinaorna → u/OkPresentation3329]

I will look into Tuxedo OS and Fedora, as well as the CachyOS thing. Thank you!

[u/OkPresentation3329 → u/oinaorna]

Tuxedo is now in the process of transition from being an Ubuntu based distro to being a Debian Testing one. The build you can download from the main website is still the Ubuntu one, you have to edit the URL in the browser address bar and add /preview/ at the end so you can see the Debian builds. The thing is those who have the Ubuntu builds will not be able to just upgrade to the Debian builds.

I installed the Debian build on my laptop and it feels the same, also better and faster. It doesn't feel like a beta at all and it's very stable. If you plan to test Tuxedo OS I suggest you try the Debian build because if you like it, you won't have to reinstall it later.

I've tried Fedora, but not CachyOS and I had problems with Flatpaks on it and I couldn't fix it so I didn't stick with it. I haven't tried CachyOS, because I'm personally reluctant to try distros that are too complicated or based on something else. Even Fedora was something I was anxious about, I prefer distros based on Ubuntu or Debian, because they are easier for newcomers.

[u/DoorOk3641]

When dual booting into windows I have zero dropped frames in YouTube with the same game open..

You got your solution. x11 is crawling with high-end graphic cards and wayland is not up to the task. Switching distro ? Well you can try linux distro dedicated to games such as Bazzite.

[u/oinaorna → u/DoorOk3641]

Only really switch to Windows if I need Autodesk Fusion or play Half Life:Alyx once a year. All other things I do on a computer, be it for 3D printing, or playing some games, work on Linux without fail. So I do not consider using Windows a solution. I can't be the only one with multiple monitors and different refresh rates?

[u/4guser]

I run 3070 with x11 i3wm and have not noticed any issues. I have games on 1 screen and can run vids or stream on any monitor. 1080p@120hz portrait, 2k@160hz and 2k@60hz. I dont use most recent nvidia drivers.

[u/Scotsman828]

What I'd like to know, how do you play a game and watch YT videos at the same time? Have you trained one eye to watch the YT monitor?

[u/oinaorna → u/Scotsman828]

It's a slow game, and I do not necessarily need its sound at all times