I’ve reported the same issue to Cinnamon but I’m posting it here too bc I was told that this might be a driver issue.
Cinnamon 5.4.12, Arch Linux 64-bit, GTX 1660 Ti, 515.57.
Issue
Flipping is working for some games only
Steps to reproduce
Download game named Cradle, it’s on Steam and it’s available for Linux natively.
Create a profile in local nvidia-settings to display OSD (the thing that shows FPS), it’s called “GLShowGraphicsOSD”. You might have to run the game once to see the process name and then add it to the nvidia-settings profile, so that when nvidia-settings finds this process, it will display the OSD along with FPS and other info.
Run the game and observe the top left corner - it will read “FLIP - VSYNC ON” all in green text which means Flipping is working.
Now do the same (process name set to eurotrucks2) for Euro Truck Simulator 2 (also on Steam and also available for linux natively), then run the game. This time you’ll see “BLIT - VSYNC ON” with “BLIT” being written in red color.
Metro 2033 (another native game) also has the “BLIT” which means flipping isn’t working.
Half Life 2 (also native) sometimes flipping is working, sometimes it isn’t.
Expected behaviour
Flipping should be working for all games.
Other information
All the necessary settings in xorg.conf for flipping to work have been made:
I use only drivers whose versions are two groups of digits - 465.31, 515.57 and so on, so don’t offer me the latest driver whose version is like this: XXX.XX.XX.
I’m having exactly the same issue: flipping is enabled totally randomly in CS2 (about 5–10% possibility to have flipping on when I launch the game, otherwise blit which results in VRR failing to work which is absolutely required to make the game enjoyable on this old card) but it is usually enabled in Portal games. Did you ever find a solution to this problem?
(I’m running Ubuntu 22.04 with XFCE desktop on Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB using driver package “nvidia-driver-535” from official Ubuntu repository – right now it takes driver version “535.161.07-0ubuntu0.22.04.1” as a dependency. If no solution can be found, I think we must assume that the drivers are just broken for these older Pascal architecture cards.)
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the problem is some kind of race condition in CS2 because it also randomly fails to initialize the audio correctly and I have to go in game Settings – Audio and keep toggling the options until the music starts playing. I haven’t found any way to enable flipping instead of blitting in the in-game options to workaround the problem.
Mikko, I used to think it was the driver (that was 2 yrs ago) but now I’m not so sure anymore. I think it’s the desktop itself.
Currently I have nvidia driver 550.54.14 with GTX 1660 Ti & Cinnamon 5.2.7. Nowadays Cinnamon is version 6.0.+ but I forbade it and all of its packages and dependencies from updating, so that it stays 5.2.7 forever. Because ever since the Mint team removed metacity from Cinnamon 5.4.0, flipping stopped working and it’s sill NOT working in 6.0. Considering how many times I asked them to fix it, even posted a bugreport on github and they did nothing to fix it, IMO they don’t care. So talk to the devs of xfce what did they change the cause flipping to stop working and in which version they did it. Then downgrade to an older version of xfce. That’s your only option.
P.S. Driver 535 is a sh*t - literally, better find a way to update it to 545 or newer. Or dowgrade it to 525.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve now tried with various driver versions and I agree that driver version 535 is the culprit here.
If I use version 525, 545 or 550 flipping works as intended. However, every version has different bugs:
With version 525 CS2 hangs when I fire a weapon. This used to work so some recent upgrade of CS2 changed how weapon muzzle is rendered and it hangs the GPU driver.
Version 535 fails to enable flipping with 95-99% probability.
Version 545 and 550 hand and show only a black screen if I have display compositor enabled for my desktop and I switch between virtual terminals with different resolutions (e.g. CTRL+ALT+F1, CTRL+ALT+F2, CTRL+ALT+F7 results in black screen with only mouse cursor visible).
As a result, it seems that Nvidia just cannot provide a working GPU driver. You can only choose the least worst option for you.