Games are blinking with weird colours in fullscreen mode when using upscaling

[StragaSevera]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Are you using any gamescope patches or a forked version of gamescope?

• The issue occurs on upstream gamescope without any modifications

Current Behavior

Whenever I launch a game upscaled with filters (either fsr or nis) and put it in fullscreen mode - either by shortcut or launch option, the screen starts blinking with weird colours and the Steam console log is spammed with [gamescope] [Error] xdg_backend: Compositor released us but we were not acquired. Oh no.
Tried this on two separate games - Graveyard Keeper (native) and Titan Quest (proton) - both have this blinking.
Attaching a photo of the screen, because for some reason a screenshot doesn't capture the artifacts:

Steps To Reproduce

1. Launch Graveyard Keeper with gamescope -w 1920 -h 1080 -F fsr -- %command%.
2. Observe no visual problems and no log spam.
3. Press Super+F to make the game fullscreen.
4. Observe artifacts and log spam.

Hardware information

- Distro: Arch Linux
- CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700F CPU @ 2.90GHz
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
- Driver Version: NVIDIA 565.77

Software information

- Desktop environment: KDE 6.2.5
- Session type: wayland
- Gamescope version:  gamescope version 3.16.1 (gcc 14.2.1)
- Gamescope launch command(s): `gamescope -w 1920 -h 1080 -F fsr -- %command%`

Which gamescope backends have the issue you are reporting?

• Wayland (default for nested gamescope)
• DRM (default for embedded gamescope, i.e. gamescope-session)
• SDL
• OpenVR

Logging, screenshots, or anything else

No response

[matte-schwartz]

Can you share a full log that starts from launching Gamescope?

[StragaSevera]

Here it is: https://gist.github.com/StragaSevera/c81d3c623b8cf6d41004eafd17008876

[matte-schwartz]

Hmm, I bought the game and I'm not seeing the same type of flickering yet on a laptop I have with a 3070 dGPU but I'll keep trying for a bit. The picture you shared looks very similar to #1593 (comment) though.

[StragaSevera]

Wow, you bought the game just for debugging my problem? o_O
Yes, it looks really similar.

[matte-schwartz]

I do see the issue on my desktop Nvidia rig as well, it started happening after switching between TTY consoles a few times.

I highly suspect it's the same corruption issue as the DRM backend that I linked, since both that issue and your issue started happening at the same time during my testing today. Unfortunately I don't think it's been picked up as an official bug by Nvidia yet so I don't really have any suggestions in the meantime other than stay tuned

[StragaSevera]

I'm using the wayland backend right now, I get errors in console when I try to use DRM or SDL ones. Should I link the logs with those backends?

[matte-schwartz]

SDL backend I already know the issue, you need #1548 which isn't in a gamescope release yet

DRM I'd need to see logs to know what's going on there.

[matte-schwartz]

Flickering seems to come from somewhere in gamescope's composition pipeline, you can trigger the same flickering without FSR just with gamescope -w 1920 -w 1080 --force-composition -- %command% and then toggling the gamescope window to fullscreen.

[matte-schwartz]

not game specific either, but just appears to be NVIDIA-specific.

working: gamescope -w 1920 -h 1080 --composite-debug -- glxgears and Super + F to toggle fullscreen

IMG_2784.mov

flickering: gamescope -w 1920 -h 1080 --composite-debug --force-composition -- glxgears and Super + F to toggle fullscreen

IMG_2785.mov

CCing @cubanismo on this, this issue should be pretty straightforward to replicate on any Wayland DE (I'm using Plasma 6 Wayland) with NVIDIA drivers. I'm on 570.86.16 but past driver versions (and closed modules) are also affected by the issue. I'll try to dig in more to see if I can narrow down what part of our composition process in gamescope might be causing issues here.

nvidia-bug-report.log.gz

[StragaSevera]

DRM I'd need to see logs to know what's going on there.

Here are the logs: https://gist.github.com/StragaSevera/49beb9d54fd0ca74884cb62b2821e769

Yep, the command you listed produces flickering for me too =-)

[cubanismo]

Thank you for the report. For future reference, I've filed NVIDIA internal bug 5089016 to track this issue.