For posterity’s sake here is what I ended doing.

• I reinstalled Bazzite and switched over to KDE variant
• Flicker seems a lot better then Gnome under KDE, especially at the desktop level
• In the games I have tested, flicker still feels more prominent then Windows 11 - mostly noticeable in HDR games with fluctuating framerates and in menus (even if that menu has stable frame rate)
• Flicker patterns are different under KDE then Gnome, some games has less flicker, some more, overall an improvement

HDR is working well under KDE, the Wayland mode in GE Proton introduces a big performance hit in some games unfortunately.

Yeah I was exploring KDE on a Fedora live disc and I guessed that is what automatic vrr was doing. Turning it to always introduced more flicker but still seemed less then gnome.

It’s way worse if I run games under the experimental Wayland mode that you enable with GE.

What distro are you using? I am on Bazzite

https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesX/comments/t3fn6l/can_someone_explain_vrr_like_im_5_what_it_does/

Ok, so let’s say your tv is a typical 60hz TV, that means it updates 60 times a second, regardless of the games frame rate. A 60fps game will be in perfect sync with your TV, as will 30fps because each frame will just be displayed twice. When your game is running at a frame rate in between it’s not in sync with the display any more and you end up with screen tearing, as the image being sent to the TV changes part way through the image being displayed.

VRR stands for Variable a refresh Rate. It basically means the displays refresh rate can vary to match the source of the image, so that it always stays in sync.

This a pretty good explanation of what VRR is doing. Basically makes it so you can drop frames and it still feels smooth.

Kind of a bummer to hear - I was hoping KDE’s VRR implementation might avoid the issue. It may be a Wayland problem so that would be unavoidable.

Edit: did some testing with a live image tonight - at least on my machine KDE seems much better when it comes to flicker

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.

TIL I had no idea you could untick compatibility and some games would auto-run with a Valve selected Proton version

This is a good step but I still feel like it’s pretty obscure where a package is actually coming from. “by Google” or for the Steam package “by Valve” is really confusing and makes it sounds like it’s coming directly from the company. Unverified tells the user to pay attention but there is no hover over to say what it actually means.

Refactoring is something that should be constantly done in a code base, for every story. As soon as people get scared about changing things the codebase is on the road to being legacy.

It’s crazy how good this is, from a software engineering perspective I have no idea how they pulled this off. Morrowind is such a complex game, not sure how they reverse engineered it.