Severe in-game flickering
Hello,
Ever since updating from
41.20250216.2 I've been having constant flickering with games running in fullscreen (or windowed borderless). My GPU is an AMD 7900XT, and I run the regular bazzite image.
I have a dual monitor setup, two same model monitors (Dell G2724D) running at 1440p165, The model supports VRR, but it doesn't make a difference if it's on or off. I also found a recent KDE forum post [1] where a user mentioned night light causes flickering, but I found it being on or off also makes no difference (I had both VRR and night light off and the issue still persisted).
Lowering the refresh rate of both monitors to 60Hz, turning off one of the monitors, and running the games in windowed mode seemed to stop the flickering (or perhaps made it very unlikely).
Rolling back to 41.20250216.2 "fixes" everything, but is not an ideal solution. The most significant changes seem to be Linux 6.13 and Plasma 6.3.1, and the version bumps happened at the same time so I couldn't check which might've caused the issue.
Let me know if you need additional information.
Games I tested:
- Final Fantasy XIV Online (using XIVLauncher flatpak): Flickering happens when clicking the left or right mouse buttons, at random, and on Alt-Tabbing into or out of the window.
- Deep Rock Galactic: Doesn't happen on mouse click but at random and on alt-tabbing.
- The Spell Brigade (Same as Deep Rock Galactic)
- Pacific Drive (Same as Deep Rock Galactic)
- Beam.NG (Same as Final Fantasy)
- Road to Vostok Demo (No flickering)
Versions I tried:
- stable-41.20250227
- stable-41.20250301
- testing-41.20250303
1: https://discuss.kde.org/t/flickering-in-fullscreen-applications-on-wayland-with-night-light-enabled/30822KDE Discuss
Flickering in fullscreen applications on wayland with night light e...
As the title states, I’ve run into an issue where when I mouse over a fullscreen application, such as a game, I get a brief but very noticeable flash. This only occurs when I have the “night light” enabled and only in a wayland session. I previously “fixed” this by downgrading kwin to a version before 6.3.1, but after a system update today, doin...
1 Reply
I tried out
testing-41.20250303 because I noticed the KDE version was bumped, however the flickering hasn't gone away at all. I've also tested this latest release with a few other games as well.
- The Spell Brigade (Windows version)
- Pacific Drive
- Beam.NG
- Road to Vostok Demo
With the first three, the flickering was always present when the focus changed, and with Beam.NG pressing the mouse buttons also caused it (just like FFXIV). However with Road to Vostok Demo I couldn't cause any flickering at all! Not sure what's different about it, I tried for about 15 mins and I didn't notice anything.
I also took recordings of the gameplay in the above games (using Steam's new recording function) and the videos don't show any of the flickering, it looks as it should.