Primarily because my income doesn’t really allow for me to go any higher than that, I already worked a bit overtime last month since the opportunity was available in order to be able to pick it up. Short of a GPU magically falling from the sky, it was always going to be a lateral move at best. I’d love to either not have to spend money on a card that isn’t really going to gain me a performance boost (and I don’t do any raytracing, my gaming is still fairly lightweight - I’m still on 1080p 60Hz monitors for example), but Nvidia’s stupid games (ha) is pretty much forcing my hand.
As of right now, using Wayland is nigh impossible for me due to the this issue and a fix is a long way out from now because it requires approval on an explicit sync protocol, and then every single compositor will need to implement it - assuming it was approved fairly quickly, its not likely to land in KDE Plasma 6’s initial release, and I doubt it’ll make it in time for GNOME’s next release in the spring. If I used only Wayland-native apps it’d be fine, but that’s not the case - my IDE that I use for work for example uses XWayland and experiences the linked issue very heavily and makes it impossible to actually do any work in. Not to mention, most games still use XWayland since they run through WINE/Proton which doesn’t have Wayland support yet. But hey, at least Night Light/Color finally works in Wayland as of 545 (which don’t even get me started on how ridiculously long that took to get in)…
X11 is hugely problematic because I can hardly reach 60 FPS on just the desktop with basic windows open, the closest I can get is by running KDE and replacing the compositor responsibilities with picom, which has its own fair share of issues. I’ve spent all year trying various tweaks, driver versions, playing around with X/Nvidia settings, using KWin’s and GNOME’s triple buffer (patch), and this was the best I can do.
I was really banking on 545 fixing the situation with Wayland, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon given explicit sync needing to be added into XWayland - or Nvidia rewriting their driver to use implicit sync (which is a pipe dream, given that their driver’s unified architecture means that on Windows it would need to do implicit sync as well). NVK is still a fair bit out from being anywhere near production ready AFAIK, and nouveau is probably still a bit out there as well.
Ironically, Nvidia’s driver in Windows is also upsetting me. I get a stranger flicker from what I believe is the same issue as what was just fixed in 545 which is the power-state of the GPU changing. So this happens even when Steam draws its “Your friend is playing some game” notification, or opening a YouTube video.
Funnily enough, I didn’t even buy the 2080, it was passed down to me from a friend along with a few other components - I was previously on a GTX 970 which was… painful as I’m sure you can imagine due to its age, and wasn’t helped by Nvidia’s drivers being horrendous.
I’m not even a hardware person by any means (for various reasons, such as physical ailments), it was an accomplishment for me to be able to effectively tear down my old build, and replace all of the internals (PSU, Motherboard+CPU+RAM, GPU, liquid cooler… the whole works, only the case stayed the same really) so I’ll just be happy if I can get my new card swapped in without any issues. If one thing goes right for me this month, I just want it to be that.
At the end of the day, I just want my PC to work (and to let me literally work), and everything else is perfect and fully capable - well, I’m a bit disappointed by my new Intel WLAN card being shoddy in Linux but that’s a whole other story. Probably a lot longer of an answer than you expected, but that about sums it up haha.