this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Anyone else seeing Intense OLED flicker on Gnome VRR? Any flicker on KDE? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by million@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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I was recently lucky enough to buy an OLED monitor and it's great. What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

Now all OLED monitors have a certain amount of VRR flicker, but I am comparing it to my Windows duel boot and it's absolutely terrible under Gnome, like just a noticeable increase in the amount of flicker under both games and the desktop versus Windows. The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on "dynamic refresh rate", which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time. I can turn on the refresh rate panel on my monitor and Gnome can fluctuate all over the place, even on the desktop, whereas Windows is steady at max refresh (again one I turn off dynamic refresh rate, which is a separate setting then VRR).

For games the flicker is way worse using proton under Wayland (which GE supports). Hunt Showdown - which I play a lot, looks incredibly flickery when vsync and Wayland are turned on, it basically has a strobing effect.

Anyone else seen this in action? Any suggestions for a fix? Should I swap over to KDE for a bit until Gnome gets this straightened out or will Plasma have the same problems?

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (9 children)

What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on adaptive refresh rate, which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time.

I don't totally get what you're trying to accomplish. If you don't want VRR in the desktop environment, are you wanting VRR only to be active when a fullscreen game or movie player is running or something?

EDIT: I'd also add that my understanding is that brightness fluctuation is kind of part and parcel with VRR on current OLED display controllers. I don't think that it's a fundamental limitation, that you could make a display controller that did a better job, but I've read articles matching up OLED monitors, and all of them that I've read about suffer from this. Like, if I got an OLED monitor today myself, I'd probably just set a high static refresh rate (which, fortunately, is something that OLED does do well).

[–] million@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I had the name wrong initially - I just edited it to correct it, but under Windows "dynamic refresh rate" - is distinct then VRR. Settings reads "To help save power, Windows adjusts the refresh rate up the selected rate above". See https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/29/22555295/microsoft-windows-11-dynamic-refresh-rate-laptops.

I can turn it off and still have VRR enabled.

Trust me when I say the amount of OLED flicker is much much higher in Gnome then under Windows for the exact same games. Like give you eye strain and a headache super fast. I still see a little flicker under Windows but it's not comparable.

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