Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
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Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#2This is why I read Hacker News. Thank you.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#3He 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.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#4Amazing work. Thank you for putting this together.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#5> 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.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#6He 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.
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.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#7I saw a very similar post a month or two ago, is this the same author?
edit: no, this is the one I was remembering: https://farnoy.dev/posts/linux-latency
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#8> 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.
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.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#9Great 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.
Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
#10From the "Similar Efforts" section toward the bottom:
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David Ramiro built his m2p-latency and compared X11 vs Wayland in his article Building an Input Latency Meter (Because ‘Wayland Feels Off’ Isn’t a Metric) as well, coming to similar conclusions:
Native Wayland is on par with native X11 (all tied at ~7 ms), while XWayland roughly doubled the latency in his tests.
farnoy did extensive testing with the Open-Source-LDAT in his post Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning, also concluding that XWayland should be avoided.