Black screens during a few seconds in games when G-Sync is enabled (510/515 proprietary driver for Linux)

Graphics / Linux Linux
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Good morning!

I’m running Linux on a system with these specifications:

  • Processor: Core i5 4670K @ 3.8 GHz;
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87-D3HP;
  • RAM: 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 MHz;
  • Graphics card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti SC;
  • Power supply: OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W;
  • Monitor: LG Pro Gamer Ultrawide 29UM69G-B (2560x1080p, 75 Hz, Freesync);
  • Operating system: KDE Neon 5.25.3 (kernel 5.15.0-41-generic);
  • Graphics driver: 515.48.07 (NV-CONTROL 1.29), downloaded from the official Ubuntu (KDE Neon) repositories.

When I’m playing CPU intensive games such as Battlefield 1, sometimes the screen goes black and stays like that for a few seconds (about 2 or 3 seconds) until coming back. It seems to happen in some of the moments when there is a FPS drop below the Freesync range of the monitor (which seems to be 45 - 75 FPS).

Enabling “Force Composition Pipeline” “fixes” the issue because it prevents G-Sync from working. Playing in windowed mode also “fixes” the issue, because, again, G-Sync will not work. But losing G-Sync means losing a feature that improves my gaming experience a lot (it’s clearly noticeable).

My monitor is not G-Sync Validated, but G-Sync (Freesync) used to work perfectly fine with the GTX 1070Ti when I was still a Windows user. I’ve done lots and lots of research and there is a lot of discussion about this topic, but the issue seems related to the proprietary driver itself.

I’ve found this topic, which seems to bring a similar issue, and Nvidia said this was fixed for driver 470: NVIDIA 470.74 Breaks Gsync (Compatible) Support (Monitor Modulates between 0 or 144hz and Flickers black). However, I tried driver 510 and 515 and this issue is still happening.

Is this issue already being worked on? Is there a fix coming?

Thanks in advance.

2

It was fixed for me a while back on my freesync monitor which I noted in the original post you tagged. Im not sure the current issue. The original issue I posted on was the monitor turning black if it dropped below 144. So i believe yours is a slightly different issue

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