I can see in the "/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules" file that there are still a few things that can prevent Wayland from being selectable at the login screen (GDM):
- the system is running on a PC with the Hi1710 chipset
- kernel modesetting is disabled
- the "nvidia-drm" modeset is disabled
- the system's NVIDIA driver version is lower than 470
Through manual testing, I have determined that my problem was that the "nvidia-drm" modeset was disabled. The best way I have found so far to remedy the situation is by adding the following to the "/etc/default/grub" file:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
Lastly, run "sudo update-grub" to write your changes out to your system's GRUB configuration file (/boot/grub/grub.cfg) and reboot.
Note: To actually use Wayland, you will need to manually select it if it isn't already the default on your system. On Ubuntu, this can be done at the login screen by first selecting the desired user and then clicking on the gear icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. If no gear icon is visible, Wayland is not available on your system in its current configuration. If this is the case, check to verify that none of the other issues listed above are to blame.
Although the steps above were all that was required to get hardware-accelerated Wayland running on my laptop, I later discovered that a separate Ubuntu installation on my home desktop was still using software rendering—as opposed to GPU-accelerated rendering—for programs running under XWayland (i.e. most games).
This can be fixed by adding the "universe" repository to APT (as it's not currently available in "main", the Canonoical-supported repo), and then running:
sudo apt install libnvidia-egl-wayland1
This has caused some applications to behave unexpectedly in my experience, but it has also fixed my hardware rendering issues.
