Update: I continue testing for as long as I can (will have to stop by the end of this week / this weekend). So far Ubuntu 23.10 remains the only option where both X11 AND Wayland are performing really well under Gnome with beautifully triple synced vsync. Ubuntu 22.04.4, 23.04, OpenSUSE 15.5 Leap and even Tumbleweed all have major performance issues with Gnome’s animations using X11. If I switch to Wayland, performance / fps increases nicely even at 4k60 resolution for all of the distros that I mentioned - excluding OpenSUSE Leap 15.5 where Wayland can still be seen stuttering and lagging.
Thus far the only thing that manages to actually help with X11 Gnome performance is launching nvidia-settings once for the current session until reboot. In addition, I also found this repo for Tumbleweed: Show home:tjyrinki_suse:branches:openSUSE:Factory / mutter - openSUSE Build Service
More info here: GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering patch on openSUSE | Timo's openSUSE Posts
Which enables Ubuntu’s triple buffering solution for Tumbleweed users. It works really well under Wayland, which makes animations even smoother than before, but for X11 I still have to manually launch nvidia-settings once in order to bring desktop animations under Gnome up to 4k60fps most of the time. Not sure if Timo is using the latest and greatest triple buffering / Mutter development from Ubuntu 23.10, or if he’s using the Gnome 42 Ubuntu 22.04 triple buffering patch-set, haven’t had the time to check yet, but at least this remains a usable option until vanilla Gnome gets official triple buffering support one day. IIRC Ubuntu continues to tweak, optimize and enhance their triple buffering feature with every interim release and its corresponding version of Gnome coming after 22.04 LTS.
In addition, as mentioned previously, if I don’t launch nvidia-settings under X11 at least once during the session, I have also seen windows behave the same way that the person is showcasing in this video under KDE: So when will desktop performance issues be addressed by nvidia?
Window resizing = low fps, sometimes even tearing and stuttery behaviour before launching nvidia-settings. This issue does not occure under Wayland and can only be seen under X11.
Now… I understand that explicit sync is almost ready to launch for Nvidia + Gnome 46 + Wayland etc. and that we’re most likely going to be seeing an Nvidia driver update supporting these features next month, which would mean that Proton gaming and normal desktop usage gets fixed for Nvidia users under Wayland. I might just wait until that happens and transition over to Wayland the moment that our drivers get updated in openSUSE, but it would still be nice to understand why X11 is behaving this way on my A2000. Again, only Ubuntu 23.10 manages to render Gnome both on X11 and Wayland buttery smooth. What’s the difference between Ubuntu 23.10 and everything else on the list? Is it Ubuntu’s newer and more mature triple buffering patch in 23.10?
PS: I’ve been testing the open kernel module drivers V550 (beta) on both Ubuntu 23.10 and openSUSE Tumbleweed and so far gaming and normal desktop usage has been a really good experience on my A2000. Will test some more games and also do some screen recording to check how the new drivers perform on a daily basis.
Cheers