Flickering Vivaldi 7.5 on Plasma Wayland with NVIDIA

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Hey all. Since the upgrade to Vivaldi 7.5 (NixOS unstable), I’m seeing terrible flickering when scrolling, especially when using the desktop zoom effect on Plasma Wayland. I’m using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

I had this problem in the past and was able to fix it by going to vivaldi://flags and setting Preferred Ozone platform to Wayland, but this seems to have stopped working between 7.4 and 7.5. Anyone else seeing this and found a workaround?

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Flickering with an nvidia GPU is usually an indicator of explicit sync not working. Check these docs: Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia - KDE Community Wiki

You should confirm whether your browser is actually running as a native wayland client, rather than using the X11 backend (that’s what the ozone thing is supposed to do). Share your nvidia driver config while you’re at it, t’s notoriously difficult to configure correctly and there’s a lot of bad advice out there.

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Thanks. I went through that wiki and all looks good. My NVIDIA / Wayland config is HERE. I ran xprops and get back nothing for the Vivaldi window as opposed to Steam so I’m pretty confident it’s native Wayland. (Is there a more definitive way to tell?)

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Quick update, though: I solved it by disabling Use Hardware Acceleration When Available in Vivaldi settings. Been running this way for a few hours flicker-free and there doesn’t seem to be any negative consequence. I tested some YouTube videos and demos on WebGL Samples and all runs smoothly.

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Hum, that should have no real impact, at least on youtube, there’s no way to get video hardware acceleration on chrome.

You’ll be taxing your CPU quite heavily if you do software WebGL, but if that works for you, fair enough I guess. Personally I’d at least give updating the driver a shot, happen to have written a comment on how to do that here: Screen and IO freezing after switching from 24.11 to 25.05 on Nvidia hardware - #2 by TLATER

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Ahh, you’re right. I tested more on that WebGL Samples site with the Use Hardware Acceleration When Available setting turned on and off and I do see a difference in GPU usage and smoothness when it’s on. When I get time, I’ll try updating the driver, although considering the problem goes away if I downgrade to Vivaldi 7.4, I’m not too confident that’ll fix it.