For some background, my system runs a ryzen7 3770x and RTX 4080 and has be working very nicely on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS for work and games for more than a year now. I use KDE plasma (x11) and when the display it set at 144hz, the desktop experience is suuuper smooth, both in terms of cursor latency and how moving windows around feels. This is something I quickly got used to running a high refresh-rate display on Windows, and I never managed to have the same experience on a linux desktop before installing Pop on this PC. How smooth 22.04 felt on this system blew my mind and was the main reason I finally switched to linux for good at the time.

Now back to today. After the subject of the next release got mentioned recently on this community, I wanted to five it a go. I tried running Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha 7 from a flash drive, featuring the new cosmic desktop and the wayland compositor. I’m sorry to report didn’t run that well. I do have the option the set the display to 144hz, and I do see an improvement switching from 60hz for sure, but the mouse cursor still has noticeable input lag and moving windows around is not very smooth. Not unusable to be fair, but definitely not as smooth as I’m used to on x11.

I tried running some video content also, and VRR made the screen flicker during playback, which looked quite bad. Disabling VRR entirely made videos play OK though.

Someone had better success running 24.04 on nvidia? Is it even supposed to be performing well already?