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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

#71

Post by drdexebtjl »

Telaneo wrote: post #39
hs86 wrote: post #22

It looks like consoles and PCs have settled on somewhat different gaming configurations. Consoles usually try to target a fixed output frame rate, while the resolution is often dynamic. On PCs, by contrast, the resolution stays static, while the frame rate and frame-time pacing are dynamic. How does this fit into the latency discussion? Especially in competitive gaming, I often see people targeting frame rates way be…

> I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect. If they are chasing a placebo effect, it's a really powerful one, since all the actual competitive people are often willing to sacrifice all detail and quite a lot of resolution to get those stupid high frame rates. I can see the di…

There’s an argument to be made that dropping all unimportant detail could make professional players react faster even if it doesn’t improve end-to-end latency in the PC.

This is something that could be tested experimentally, but isn’t, because the subjects we would need to test this on are all sponsored by hardware vendors.

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

#73

Post by bee_rider »

Havoc wrote: post #47

Using Wayland (hyprland) for daily driver and it's the happiest I've been with an OS in a long time on feel. Feels crisp in that spartan way that windows & macos just don't - no animations, taskbar, popups or god knows what else.

That’s interesting. Hyprland, spartan? It’s the fancy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink tiling WM, isn’t it?

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

#74

Post by NelsonMinar »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #57
NelsonMinar wrote: post #15

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…

>give Bazzite a whirl I never really understood Bazzite's immutable fs thing. Can one install standard dev stuff (i.e. compilers, ides, etc) easily under bazzite? This use case is the main reason why I lean towards maybe using cachyos

Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer.

So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming.

The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.

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

#75

Post by shmerl »

tfrancisl wrote: post #17
bigyabai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I'd say it's deserved, not FUD. Nvidia did improve in some ways, but it's still way too heavy into blob even in case you plan to use it in the future with nvk. Nouveau / nova developers explained that Nvidia pushed a lot more into their firmware than AMD, turning the kernel driver into more of a shim than an actual driver. That's already a big downside.

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

#76

Post by cgyvbunji »

Aurornis wrote: post #44
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.

> and noticed that significant lag Only xwayland showed that result. The difference was only a couple milliseconds. That’s in the range where I start to doubt that people are feeling the latency difference. If it was 10-20ms I could believe it, but not when it’s a couple milliseconds. The author of this post did a good job of getting all of the other confounding settings out of the way. It’s possible that the people…

You might be right, 8 ms of total end to end latency is about 1 frame at 120 hz or half a frame of 60 hz, someone would need to be quite competitive to notice that. And the baseline was 4 ms, so going from half a frame of total e2e latency at 120 hz to 1 frame, not much of a difference. Also in 2026 I'm realizing it might be doubtful that many games would still be only x11, so I'm not sure how common it would be to encounter xwayland in a game today realistically.

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

#78

Post by wongarsu »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #66
torginus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of thing is certainly possible under Windows - you can basically patch any kernel API call, replace any COM object instantiation, install filter drivers that intercept any request to and from a device, replace userland DLLs with your own. It's really scary what you can do, to the point that I often asked myself 'why allow this?' - seeing as hits on certain APIs took me to blackhat forums and articles about…

Oh sure, but if I just need to troubleshoot why Minecraft-launcher (a first party app) won't launch ... it didn't give any output; it didn't even exist apparently, but only because MS were hiding it, had to crack out Process Explorer just to get something to troubleshoot on ... then it turns out the "turnkey" app from their first-party app store, loading the first-party app, on the same company's OS just failed with…

The developers of Process Explorer have a lot more to do with the OS than the makers of Minecraft, even if the company name is the same on all three

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

#79

Post by teodorlu »

Very interesting!

Latency numbers are written with three significant digits (4.21 ms). I'm curious about the accuracy of the measurement device. If it can measure tens of microseconds, I'm impressed. If it can't, the conclusions in this article should be taken more coarsely.

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

#80

Post by Telaneo »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #71
Telaneo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect. If they are chasing a placebo effect, it's a really powerful one, since all the actual competitive people are often willing to sacrifice all detail and quite a lot of resolution to get those stupid high frame rates. I can see the di…

There’s an argument to be made that dropping all unimportant detail could make professional players react faster even if it doesn’t improve end-to-end latency in the PC. This is something that could be tested experimentally, but isn’t, because the subjects we would need to test this on are all sponsored by hardware vendors.

A fair argument at least for some games.

The games I have in mind though still have those details present on lower settings. Instead they just look like shit rather than disappear. To be fair though, that just might make those details have higher contrast and not fade into the background as much.

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