I currently have a dual monitor setup of a Dell 24" and 27", neither are variable refresh rate. I think the 24" monitor is getting on for 17 years old and has had issues with lines on it when cold for the past 13 years. But it’s my second monitor and once it’s warmed up it’s not too bad. Well I think the time has come to retire it and for my main 27" to become my secondary monitor and buy a new primary. I am interested in photography so accurate colours are important to me, which is why I bought these monitors in the first place. But I also play games, so something with some gaming features like Freesync and >60Hz refresh rates I also want. I’ve got my eye on a ASUS ROG Strix XG27ACS, fwiw.

I am running Endeavour OS (kernel 6.13.1) with KDE Plasma (6.2.5) on Wayland with a Radeon RX 5700 XT. My question is: Will my setup allow me to run one non-freesync monitor @60Hz and one Freesync monitor using the VRR at up to 180Hz. So I can get all the benefits of the new monitor when gaming, without having to turn the second monitor off?

I believe that if I just had the one monitor I’d have no issues and my setup would be plug and play. But as this has been a long time coming with many issues along the way to get VRR on linux working, I’m concerned that it’s a “everything must support it or it won’t work” scenario.

Grateful for your insights and advise.

  • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3•3 days ago

    I don’t run multiple monitors – I’m in the “the monitor should be what’s in front of the eyes, and if it’s not showing useful stuff, then the software needs to be changed to deal with that” camp. So this isn’t based on personal experience.

    However, I strongly suspect, from what reading I’ve done and the degree of involvement that the compositor has in VRR support, that it’s not just going to be Wayland, but also the compositor you use that’s a factor.

    kagis

    This is three years old, but at least at that point, it sounds like Sway and Plasma supported it, and others did not.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/q40xff/are_kde_wayland_and_sway_the_only_options_for/

    EDIT: Well, actually. Hmm. On second thought, I guess I do have a projector, and a head-mounted display, neither of which I think do VRR. Not sure if I’ve actually used them with my monitor when it had VRR enabled, though.

    My real interest for VRR is for matching video framerates exactly. mpv requires a certain amount of user configuration, depending upon how you have it set up. Like, if you want top-quality non-VRR playback, you may want some settings required for frame interpolation, IIRC, and with VRR, you don’t. So if you want to play back fullscreen videos on both monitors using both VRR and non-VRR using mpv, you might need to change config for them, at least.