I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back.
Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions.
I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity.
I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there.
I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.
seba_dos1 2 minutes ago [-]
There's no such thing as "Wayland input latency". It's just a word salad, akin to "HTTP animation smoothness". The post is measuring Xorg vs. KWin (and also XWayland), other implementations of either X11 or Wayland will have different characteristics.
stusmall 6 minutes ago [-]
Great article! Thank you. Also in case others walked away with the same question I had, I'll save you the googling: use the utility vrrtest to help validate if VRR is properly configured on your machine.
cgyvbunji 19 minutes ago [-]
He seems confused at the end why people think wayland is so slow, but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result? People were probably running x11 games on wayland and noticed that significant lag. Just a wild guess. Very nice article, wish people did actual measurements like this more often, of all sorts of things.
superkuh 9 minutes ago [-]
You can't just test one wayland compositor and talk about the performance of all wayland compositors. They're vastly different, especially when it comes to the extensions to wayland needed to handle input devices (ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/). It's not like how xorg is the standard strong reference implementation for X11 everywhere that works the same everywhere.
What's probably happening is that other wayland compositors are slower than KDE Plasma wayland which he tested. And people report that experience. Some other wayland compositors might even be faster than plasma. But what is for sure is that every wayland is very different from every other wayland.
PcChip 9 minutes ago [-]
I saw a very similar post a month or two ago, is this the same author?
Amazing work. Thank you for putting this together.
esseph 6 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
overtone1000 25 minutes ago [-]
This is why I read Hacker News. Thank you.
shmerl 12 minutes ago [-]
> A lot of people still use X11 over Wayland because Wayland is said to have much worse input lag
Wayland is fine. People should use AMD and KDE Plasma.
I'd avoid Nvidia to begin with.
bigyabai 8 minutes ago [-]
AMD's Mesa drivers are better, but if you already have an Nvidia card then you can still use it just fine with Wayland.
The biggest hit is Vulkan performance (~20% less than Windows iirc) but for desktop and casual gaming use, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are perfectly fine.
Rendered at 17:11:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back.
Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions.
I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity.
I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there.
I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.
What's probably happening is that other wayland compositors are slower than KDE Plasma wayland which he tested. And people report that experience. Some other wayland compositors might even be faster than plasma. But what is for sure is that every wayland is very different from every other wayland.
edit: no, this is the one I was remembering: https://farnoy.dev/posts/linux-latency
Wayland is fine. People should use AMD and KDE Plasma.
I'd avoid Nvidia to begin with.
The biggest hit is Vulkan performance (~20% less than Windows iirc) but for desktop and casual gaming use, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are perfectly fine.