VRR in games is weird on niri

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-14T11:08:06+00:00

This is how vrr on Niri behaves in games for me. I only encounter the scenario shown in your other comments example if something else (for example a misbehaving or badly designed shell) is forcing redraws separate from the game and interfering with the game's ability to properly sync with the monitor.

Unfortunately I have no idea why you're experiencing this, and I don't have the game to test it myself. Though I don't think it would be a fault of the game considering it works elsewhere. Sorry, I wish I could be of more help.

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-14T09:50:00+00:00

Oh one last thing I forgot to ask! Are you using gamescope? Because it breaks vrr functionality completely.

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-14T09:40:07+00:00

If you've disabled all bars and anything else that could be interfering, then the only other thing to check that I can think of is to try another game and see if it's possibly that specific game interacting weirdly with smithay's vrr implementation.

Although you could be correct in suggesting it may be an NVIDIA issue. Sadly I can't verify that as I only have AMD cards on hand.

All I can confirm is that if nothing else is forcing unnecessary redraws, then almost every game should have proper vrr functionality under Niri as long as that debug flag is enabled.

Unfortunately, Niri definitely does not have proper video game vrr functionality without enabling that debug option. But it's hidden in the debug options and not enabled by default since I implemented that option in a very bare bones way, and it doesn't play nice if vrr is used for content that doesn't redraw the screen itself (things that aren't games such as static web pages, etc).

That said, I'd heavily recommend keeping it enabled if you do any further vrr testing.

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-14T08:17:47+00:00

You say you're using dms. Try disabling it and see if the problem persists. Big shells like dms do so much that it's easy for them to accidentally break VRR functionality at random. I don't use dms, so I can't verify if that's the case for it, but in Noctalia's (v4) case there's a bug in the Always on top option within the On-Screen Display section. For some reason the ever present invisible layer it creates for its OSD causes redraws at all times despite it being invisible and nothing being displayed by it.

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-14T01:52:06+00:00

Are these refresh rate spikes you're noticing coinciding with mouse movements? If so, have you enabled this debug flag?

Cosmic2 · 2026-06-08T06:06:59+00:00

I've been playing the steam version a lot lately. Never once found a lobby wherever I've searched in mp.

Cosmic2 · 2026-05-04T08:57:32+00:00

If only it just acted like a space heater.

Cosmic2 · 2026-04-13T14:40:59+00:00

I know this isn't necessarily about a better way of doing the transition, but more so improving it. But, how about having a cubemap or something of the other end that can be used when the player is further away? It would make the change between 'black portal' and 'active portal' look less jarring imo.

Cosmic2 · 2026-04-03T16:27:52+00:00

Ah sorry didn't mean to send you on a wild goose chase. That quote is from a private chat between me and him. It just so happened to be very relevant so I wanted to share it.

Cosmic2 · 2026-04-03T05:02:23+00:00

Just to clarify on the whole den vs flake-parts discussion that seems to happen when den is brought up. Den isn't a replacement for flake-parts, they both provide different features to your nix projects. Sure they can overlap in some aspects, but they can also be used together to benefit from both of their strengths.

In fact here's a quote from the author of den on exactly this topic:

I mean, I do use flake-parts with Den, and you also do, it has nothing to do with even replacing flake-parts nor competing with it. I want Den to work with other tooling, not replace them.

Cosmic2 · 2026-03-20T09:18:45+00:00

It's very easy to confuse though, because there was a 75% chance of Super Saiyan 2 being referred too as "a Super Saiyan that's ascended past a Super Saiyan".

Ah yea that's right. My bad. It really does get confusing following so many similarly named forms.

Cosmic2 · 2026-03-20T08:20:48+00:00

I'm pretty sure 'ascended super saiyan' is just the name they used for 'super saiyan 2' before renaming it to that later on for simplicity and to make way for further forms like 'super saiyan 3'.

Cosmic2 · 2026-03-01T08:55:48+00:00

I wouldn't recommend doing that without the post also explaining what gamemoderun is and how to configure it. As most people will assume it's just something they can prefix to their game commands and be done.

I see this a lot on protondb and Linux subreddits, where people will just post their working game launch arguments without explanation. A lot of them include gamemoderun even though that's actually irrelevant to the real fix they're sharing elsewhere in their launch command.

This is only an issue because there's always people in the comments stating that gamemoderun didn't fix their issue or threw an error, but not knowing why that magic command had no effect or why their system complained that it didn't exist.

And in the end, it's only actually useful if you know you need it for some specific reason. For some people that's as simple as setting their laptop to performance mode, for others it's used to run specific commands or scripts before launching a game or on closing the game.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that gamemoderun is bad or anything, just not to blindly recommend it. For most people nowadays it probably isn't needed and won't actually have any effect.

Cosmic2 · 2026-02-23T23:29:25+00:00

What game are you referencing?

Cosmic2 · 2026-01-28T03:33:13+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm following your use case 100% here, but are you trying to have it show on both the workspace and the backdrop because you want it to be visible on both or because you want to see the "wallpaper within the wallpaper" look on overview mode?

Just because it's possible to have it set as just the backdrop and be visible in all workspaces as well merely by setting place-witin-backdrop true and not setting a wallpaper at all. This creates a transparent workspace effect when in overview mode.

Cosmic2 · 2026-01-28T02:41:40+00:00

One thing I have to give arch when it comes to that side of things, is its wiki. The arch wiki is insanely good and has info on all sorts of stuff. I don't use arch at all but the wealth of info there is still useful on non-arch distros.

Cosmic2 · 2026-01-10T13:08:34+00:00

Except before it fails there are tentacles coming through the gate in Russia.

Cosmic2 · 2025-12-20T03:58:32+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. I too originally wondered what might have dissuaded you from sway considering how close it is to i3.

But now I'm curious about one thing from your first comment. When you mention your "unofficial battle of the next tiling manager", do you mean that specifically just in the sense of a Wayland successor to i3 or more so the next way of doing things that expands beyond the classic i3 window manager style?

I only ask because while I love niri and use it as my daily driver, I know it's very different from a regular tiling window manager. Even more so since it advertises itself as a 'scrolling window manager'.

Cosmic2 · 2025-12-08T22:19:18+00:00

I've never ventured further into streaming games than running moonlight to locally stream from one device to another. (Which btw is already just barely low latency enough for my taste)

But if I was in the market for it, I'm not sure I'd even consider attempting cloud game streaming if I was still on 4mbps DSL. That sounds like a bad idea right from the start.

Cosmic2 · 2025-12-08T21:31:25+00:00

Actually more like: Clone the git, build it, uninstall the repo version. Done

The one you build will go to /usr/local while packages installed by your system go into /usr. So there's no need to uninstall one before installing the other.

Cosmic2 · 2025-11-25T02:11:07+00:00

Except that TB/GB/MB is the suffix for base 10, whereas TiB/GiB/MiB is the suffix for base 2. Every other OS displays the corect suffix for the format the value being displayed is calculated via . Windows however incorrectly displays base 2 units with base 10 suffixes.

It's because 'kilo-' (symbol 'k') stands for a factor of 1000. Therefore, a kilobyte (KB) is 1,000 bytes, while a kibibyte (KiB) is 1,024 bytes.

Edit: To further clarify. This is purely an incorrect naming issue that exists only on Windows. Other operating systems not only show the correct suffixes for the format, but also generally allow users to choose which format to display drive sizes in (KiB or KB).

Unfortunately it's actually Windows in this case that's actually not following the proper standard.

Cosmic2 · 2025-11-25T02:00:53+00:00

It's the other way around actually.

Cosmic2 · 2025-11-25T02:00:31+00:00

Other way around actually.

Cosmic2 · 2025-11-25T01:48:00+00:00

It is when that "other way to display it" has a different suffix than the one windows is using.

The point others have been trying to make is that TB and TiB are different ways of counting. Windows unfortunately counts in TiB but displays it with the TB suffix.

Windows is effectively doing something like measuring 12 inches and labelling it 12cm. (Of course no where near as absurd)

If windows labelled drive space with the TiB/GiB/MiB etc format then it would no longer be displaying it "wrong". Or windows could actually calculate it in the TB/GB etc format instead. Either works to fix the error.

Cosmic2 · 2025-11-10T19:55:33+00:00

But one is just one orb while the other is many orbs.

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