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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

#11

Post by prhn »

Awesome article.

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.

Now the author's got me thinking about gaming-optimized kernels, which I did not realize was a thing.

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.

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#12

Post by seba_dos1 »

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.

I wonder where the XWayland's added latency comes from though, it seems suspiciously high to just be easily hand-waved as overhead.

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#13

Post by datakan »

cgyvbunji wrote: post #3

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.

I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#15

Post by NelsonMinar »

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#17

Post by tfrancisl »

bigyabai wrote: post #8
shmerl wrote: post #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.

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.

Seconding this. I'm not happy with the fact that the drivers are proprietary, I really prefer FOSS. But, I am tired of having to deal with FUD around performance and issues with NVIDIA devices which simply don't exist at scale.

I have friends who are stuck on Windows not because they play games with Windows-only anticheat, but because theyve been told by GNU heads that NVIDIA drivers simply don't perform acceptably on Linux.

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#19

Post by [deleted] »

datakan wrote: post #13
cgyvbunji wrote: post #3

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.

I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.

[deleted]

Re: Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

#20

Post by hparadiz »

superkuh wrote: post #6
cgyvbunji wrote: post #3

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.

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 wayla…

You will also get different results by gpu, compiler, kernel, architecture, and then of course compositor. Even a slightly different version of some lib might throw off the results.

In any case the methodology in the post is sound and should be used for benchmarking in the future.

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