Hello, I cant seem to find any upto date info on this topic and all the old threads seem to suggest that these features do not work well on linux.
I am looking to get a 144hz monitor that is at least 2k in resolution. I have an Nvidia graphics card and KDE Plasma. I want to run two monitors and the 2nd monitors is 60hz and 1080p. Would this cause issues? Is there anything I need to consider when looking for a monitor?
Are you using display port or HDMI? Depending on the monitor HDMI can’t support the higher output.
I have nvidia with default vanilla Gnome on a 4k monitor. Everything in X11 works fine with 200% scaling, electron app have some problem in wayland
I can’t speak for KDE, but I run Linux Mint Cinnamon with a 1440p 144Hz monitor and a 1080p 60 Hz monitor. Everything worked except that the refresh rate for all my monitors was capped at the lowest rate either monitor could handle, which was 60Hz. I just went without the 2nd 1080 monitor so I could get 144Hz all the time.
On my PC at home I’m running KDE Plasma on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with two monitors: 1440p 240 Hz, 4k 60 Hz. Both are connected via displayport to an RTX2080. It works perfectly fine for me.
A while back, I used Linux Mint on the same system and it was a headache, where it would sometimes boot to a blank screen and I would have to restart a random number of times before it would work. I never did figure out the underlying cause, it just went away when I changed distros for other reasons…
Are you using wayland? As far as I’m aware X11 can’t handle different refresh rates for different monitors so it defaults to the lower one.
Chiming in to say #Wayland is what resolved this issue for me. I had to switch from Linux Mint Cinnamon to #EndeavourOS + #GNOME and I’m much happier with my setup now.
You will most likely have to run wayland to get the most out of your new monitor (in a dual monitor setup), other than that should work just fine.
If they want VRR they’ll have to use X11 since the Nvidia driver doesn’t support gsync on wayland. This also means they’ll likely be stuck with tearing on the lower refresh rate monitor.
If they use X itll be a removed and a half to get the higher refresh monitor to work with the lower refresh properly, I would rather forgo gsync than deal with that (as I have on my setup, running hyprland with my nvidia card with two 1080 asus monitors, one running 144hz).
