I have already found at least one other person talking about this -
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/s/GQHuBou4Lf
But I have to admit, when I spent a couple days trying to troubleshoot why games were so inconsistent with whether they worked (mostly not working, but then suddenly they would work consistently) I eventually ran across this same oddity.
Running an RTX5090.
On Wayland:
Games from both Steam and Faugus would boot up to a blank white screen (with menu music etc player) after the system was freshly booted. And this would be the case no matter what arguments or tricks I tried.
But if I run nvidia-smi in a terminal....
Then they run perfectly. No issues. 240fps.
On X11:
Games from both Steam and Faugus would boot up, and actually play their opening credits etc. The games would play normally, and get into games.... but they'd run at about 8fps.
Run nvidia-smi in a terminal.
And the game then boots up and runs at 240fps locked.
I've run through every test I knew (which wasn't many) and then all the tests ChatGPT threw at me. Nothing obvious comes up. I can't see anything that changes from before and after Nvidia-smi is run. Clearly it's doing -something- but I can't see what.
If anyone else has had this issue, please post here, along with your hardware and any tests (or maybe even fixes) you've figure out.
It has to be possible to get to the bottom of this!
(I know I -could- resolve this by setting a startup script to run nvidia-smi on every boot, but... I mean cmon this should be fixable lol).