Xwayland VRAM usage is still excessive when resizing X11 apps under wayland.

[shelterx]

I'm not sure what the "Fix an issue causing KDE crashes, which also caused excessive VRAM usage when resizing." was supposed to fix.
Resizing X11 apps like steam still makes Xwayland VRAM usage skyrocket but seems to stop at around 1.3GB. I'm not sure exactly what component causes this but I'll leave it here.

[ofourdan]

For background, that was already reported against Xwayland here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1687

[Bunnysword]

Please fix: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/560-release-feedback-discussion/300830/165?u=nicneme123

[thesword53]

This issue is not limited to Xwayland:

• If you resize a Wayland window the GPU memory usage of kwin_wayland, gnome-shell or any other wayland VM will increase in the same way.
• In KDE desktop if you are holding left mouse button to show selection and moving mouse, the GPU memory usage of plasmashell will also increase in the same way.

[shelterx]

@thesword53 indeed... you are correct, how did I miss that. I resized Konsole and here's the result:

Good find!

Version used:
Driver: 560.31.02
egl-wayland-f30cb0e

[shelterx]

This issue is not limited to Xwayland:

It's not limited to just Wayland session either, kwin_x11 also eats VRAM when resizing. I don't recall having that issue before.
So it's probably not an egl-wayland bug at all, I'll leave the issue open until it's fixed tho'.

However, kwin_x11 does release the memory after a while.. but it does it slow.

[Arcitec]

I can confirm, I went back to X11. On Fedora Workstation 40 with NVIDIA 560.35.03 and a RTX 3090.

On Wayland my average desktop uses 11 GB / 24 GB VRAM (46%) with just a web browser open. It impairs my ability to run games or AI workloads, because basically half the card's memory is wasted. One time it even reached the point where all apps crashed because VRAM ran out.

On X11 my average desktop uses 3 GB / 24 GB VRAM (12.5%) for the same workload. Games and AI workloads run great.

The issue seems to be:

• NVIDIA driver leaks VRAM. The amount wasted/hoarded always grows over time.
• Xwayland is a persistent process on Wayland (it sits around forever), so the leaked VRAM from running X11 apps NEVER gets releaesd.
• Even when my GPU needs the hoarded/leaked VRAM, the Xwayland process doesn't release it.
• The conclusion from Xwayland devs was that the problem is from NVIDIA driver because it doesn't leak with AMD: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1687

This is in addition to Wayland's other issues, such as Chromium-based browsers frequently breaking when opening new windows, causing the windows to render in a glitched way and offset by about a titlebar's height from the top of the screen, and you have to click and drag the "invisible" (totally transparent) titlebar to resize the window to get it to render properly.

And Wayland's lack of basic features such as global keyboard shortcuts/keybinds.

It's not just NVIDIA that has problems on Wayland. Most things do.

I am going back to X11 for the next 12 months and will see if Wayland is better in 2026. At least X11 is usable. :D Wayland needs more time in the bakery. Fedora plans to remove X11 by default in Fedora 41, but I'll just install it manually since Wayland is totally unusable at the moment.

[ryzendew]

I have fully tried to reproduce this issue to no Avail
If anyone has a 100% certain way please let me know. Tried on arch and fedora and Pikaos 4

[kelvie]

I can reproduce this pretty readily on KDE on arch, running nvidia 560.35.03. Just open a konsole and move resize it a bunch of times, run nvidia-smi and notice that the VRAM of kwin_wayland will go up to about 10% of the total VRAM, and kind of stop there.

Perhaps this does have to do with how nvidia is allocating, or garbage collecting, or perhaps even reporting VRAM.

[shelterx]

I have fully tried to reproduce this issue to no Avail

https://streamable.com/2ufy13

This sort of demonstrates the issue, watch kwin VRAM usage after the resizing.

• This is under Xorg so it does free it (even faster here since OBS is running it seems).
• If you to the same thing under wayland it never gets freed, until you actually close the Konsole window. And If you resize an X11 app under Wayland, like Steam, Xwayland VRAM usage does not get freed at all.

[ryzendew]

ok confirmed it's a thing on gnome as well
A friend on a 7800XT confirmed it happens on amd as well

adding a video https://streamable.com/ht9cu2

[kelvie]

This has always happened for me on xwayland (I filed that bug on FDO)but only recently for kwin_wayland, anyone know if there's an Nvidia version/egl-wayland version combo that doesn't have this problem and has explicit sync?

[shelterx]

@kelvie are you sure? It's possible it's been like that for a while. But it's easy to miss that it happens with kwin_wayland, because if you close the window that made the vram leak. Kwin vram usage goes back to normal.

Update
Here's the 550.40.71 dev driver, so yeah, it's in 550 too.

[kelvie]

@shelterx

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1617

This has happened since 545.29.06 with xwayland, I had to switch all my apps to wayland native apps to combat this if I wanted my vram.

Only with 560 it started happening with kwin_wayland for me (I also had a short stint with hyprland so I don't remember when I switched back), and currently with 560, as far as I can tell, kwin_wayland never gives back the memory even after I close the windows.