Performance parity? Heck no, not until this bug with the GSP firmware is solved: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/538

Some people have reported that installing the 32-bit version of mesa libva drivers makes it work for them? Might be worth a shot.

Yeah, in a Reddit comment, Hector Martin himself said that the memory bandwidth on the Apple SIlicon GPU is so big that any potential performance problems due to TBDR vs IMR are basically insignificant.

…which is a funny fact because I had another Reddit user swear up and down that TBDR was a big problem and that’s why Apple decided not to support Vulkan and instead is forcing everyone to go Metal.

I’ve heard something about Apple Silicon GPUs being tile-based and not immediate mode, which means the Vulkan API is different compared to regular PCs. How has this been addressed in the Vulkan driver?

Huge fucking deal, especially for Nvidia users, but it is great for the entire ecosystem. Other OSes have had explicit sync for ages, so it is great for Linux to finally catch up in this regard.

You’re correct. While the stable version of KDE Wayland is usable right now with the new driver with no flickering issues, etc., it technically does not have the necessary patches needed for explicit sync. Nvidia has put some workarounds in the 555 driver code to prevent flickering without explicit sync, but they’re slower code paths.

The AUR has a package called kwin-explicit-sync, which is just the latest stable kwin with the explicit sync patches applied. This combined with the 555 drivers makes explicit sync work, finally solving the flickering issues in a fast performant way.

I’ve tested with both kwin and kwin-explicit-sync and the latter has dramatically improved input latency. I am basically daily driving Wayland now and it is awesome.

I love Nextcloud Talk, but my biggest annoyance with it is that text chats don’t properly scroll to the bottom when new messages come in.

No port forwarding though :(

I used to use Mullvad but after they disabled port forwarding I switched over to Proton.

I truly believe the answer to this question is going to be yes around the May - June timeframe when Nvidia releases their explicit sync enabled drivers. All aboard the Wayland hype train babyyyy!

Yeah, but Apple isn’t allowing it (at least according to the comment you replied to), so if Riot continues to allow their games to run on Mac without kernel anti-cheat, then their whole argument against Linux support is moot.

But if the Mac client doesn’t have anti-cheat, doesn’t it totally defeat their whole argument?

They’re at different layers of the audio stack though so not really replacing.

Welp, I just got hit by a wave of nostalgia.

Yes, vulkan-radeon and the 32-bit equivalent of it, lib32-vulkan-radeon, provide Vulkan API support. They should definitely be installed if you plan on doing any gaming. I believe Steam depends on vulkan-driver and lib32-vulkan-driver, which vulkan-radeon and lib32-vulkan-radeon provide respectively. There’s also amdvlk which also provides vulkan-driver and is AMD’s proprietary Vulkan implementation. The general advice is to use vulkan-radeon though for the open source RADV implementation, although some games have been known to work better with AMDVLK.

If I were you though, I’d just wait until some package you install requires them. The fact that they weren’t already installed just means you weren’t using any Vulkan applications to begin with. The only caveat to this statement is if you’re installing a game manually or via something like Flatpak, in which case it may be useful to install ahead of time. Up to you.

Another thing you might consider is installing the libraries necessary for compute. You aren’t going to be doing many compute tasks on that underpowered 5700G APU, but when you do get your desktop GPU, you may want to install either ROCm, AMD’s open-source compute stack that provides things like HIP and their slightly buggy open-source OpenCL implementation, or opencl-amd, which is their tried and true, proprietary OpenCL implementation.

Do you have offline updates enabled in the Discover settings by any chance?

Thanks. Would occ files:scan work as well?

That’s definitely an awesome feature. As someone who’s spent a small fortune running an all-SSD ZFS RaidZ array, I could have used such a feature two months ago.

I was concerned that tech like DirectStorage wouldn’t make its way to Linux for a while, but I am super glad that’s not the case.

Huzzah, I just love it when more Wayland latency bugs get squashed.

Why would you want to turn Freesync off though?