Bug 487697

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SUMMARY

When enabling adaptive sync a lot of things on the desktop start stuttering in a way that looks like flicker because the brightness / colour changes. This is happening on 6.0.5 stable and on 6.1 beta installed via the kde-unstable Arch repo.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Enable adaptive sync (setting it to always makes it easier to get these situations).
2. Just do nothing.
3. See the screen flicker.

OBSERVED RESULT

It feels a lot like the refresh rate of the display as a whole is being reduced. While the display is running smoothly with 200 Hz, when I enter fullscreen in VLC for example it feels a lot more like the cursour moves at around 60 Hz. Also when on the desktop moving the cursour slowly makes the flicker go away but as soon as I move the cursour too fast it comes back again in certain applications. Other applications like Firefox are smooth no matter the cursour speed as long as it is moving. Also typing insider Firefox gets rid of the flicker, I'm fairly certain that is because of a spinner animation from LanguageTool inside textboxes as that would cause the refresh rate to stay high I guess.

EXPECTED RESULT

Everything should be smooth as the refresh rate should only be reduced if there is nothing on the desktop requesting a higher refresh rate. So for example a cursour and the animations of VLC should increase the refresh rate to 200 Hz instead of staying at whatever the framerate of the video playing is.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: Kernel 6.9.2-2-cachyos
Mesa: 24.0.1-1
KDE Plasma Version: 6.0.90
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.2.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I am aware that this might be a duplicate. However, the other issues are either with older versions, with the Nvidia driver, or markes as fixed upstream so this might still add value.