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Low FPS in Firefox on one monitor (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by chaospatterns@lemmy.world to c/linux@programming.dev

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I switched to Kubuntu 25.10 on my desktop from Windows 10 and every since, I've noticed that Linux on my primary monitor has felt very choppy with a low FPS. Animations are choppy and slow. As soon as I drag it to my second monitor, everything is faster and has higher FPS. This doesn't happen on Windows. testufo.com shows ~20fps on the problematic monitor I also haven't noticed this behavior with any other programs. There are spikes to 50fps and smoother animations when I open the Firefox menu, but then it goes back to 20fps. Chromium on the same monitor is faster and shows 50+fps. Games on this monitor also are higher fps

The primary monitor is configured to 60Hz, the second monitor is 143.97Hz. I've got an Nvidia GeForce 2070 with the NVIDIA driver (open kernel) metapackage from nvidia-driver-580-open installed, 32GB of RAM, plenty of CPU, and no other programs or tabs open even.

What could cause this issue and how can I fix it?

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[–] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I recall this happening on my higher refreshrate and resolution screen on X11 and nvidia (iirc a 2070 super). Moving to wayland fixed it.
I mainly noticed frame drops in videos in forefox, but I'm sure scrolling was also affected.

It probably manifests on a per usecase basis since it depends on how exactly the gpu or x11 is loaded. Whatever it is, it's some consequence of x11 being flawed at its core abd just not scaling well with modern usecases.

In my case I was forced onto wayland after I got my new better monitor due to how choppy x11 felt.
I had 2 1080p 60Hz and got a 4k 120/144Hz screen.

[–] chaospatterns@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Interesting. I played around with X11 vs Wayland settings just to see what different configurations give me

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 /snap/bin/firefox - Exhibits low FPS issue
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 DISABLE_WAYLAND=1 /snap/bin/firefox - Actually feels fast like it should be. Most animations feel faster, some are still choppy though. It's hard to tell.

It seems like running with X11 sort of the problem? Which seems unexpected and concerns me since I know distros are starting to default to Wayland.

[–] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

That would make it a different problem than what I saw. Either your compositor has bugs not present in its xwayland, or firefox has bugs in its wayland implementation that don't occur under x11. Seeing this is snap, that could also be causing the issue.

concerns me since I know distros are starting to default to Wayland

xwayland will be supported for a long time to come, so this would only affect users that don't know about this "fix" yet. You should be able to use firefox in x11 mode until this is fixed.

It would be good if you could check if this happens with a native (non-snap) firefox installation running on wayland. Ideally also if you could try it in a different dwm, probably kde since you are presumably using ubuntu with gnome.