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Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

I have been using --unsuported-gpu on my laptop with a quadro card in it for years

I just retried Sway on nvidia proprietary drivers. It is still a bad experience imo compared to i3.

* Cursor didn't show up at first. I had to use `export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1`, but the software cursor had some noticeable latency to it.

* Extreme flickering in both Firefox and terminals. I installed wlroots-nvidia [1] but even then the flickering, while improved, was not gone. I manually played with WLR_RENDERER options between gles2 and vulkan but they all had flickering. [2]

In the end I decided that the flickering issue prevents me from using Sway.

Hardware: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super

Driver: 550

OS: Arch Linux

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wlroots-nvidia

[2] https://streamable.com/akq43p

Any idea if you can use the proprietary nvidia driver for better gaming performance while running sway via nouveau? I'm still on i3 on my desktop but sway everywhere I have amdgpu or intel.

You definitely can't run nouveau at the same time as the propriety drivers. You can just use the proprietary drivers though. I don't know my exact stack, but I have definitely run CUDA and ROCm software while using Sway.

With recent nvidia versions, proprietary drivers work decently with Sway if you enable kernel modesetting. There was some jank with fbdev (an optional framebuffer thing with better performance) at some point, not sure if version 550 fixed it.

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