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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

#81

Post by wing-_-nuts »

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.

My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves.

All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false.

I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.

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

#82

Post by Hikikomori »

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

It competes with steamos. There are other gaming distros that work like normal distros.

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

#84

Post by boomskats »

doubled112 wrote: post #55
boomskats wrote: post #49

A lot of people conflate Wayland being worse than X11 with Gnome on Wayland being worse than Gnome on X11. Wayland has been great for me for a few years now. I don't use Gnome or nvidia though.

If I understand the semantics of it all correctly, in that sense, there is no such thing as "Wayland". It is all a little bit confusing compared to the X11 ecosystem. You don't run GNOME on Wayland. You run GNOME's Wayland compositor, which is an entirely different implementation than Plasma's Wayland compositor.

That's what I mean though.

I've not used gnome for years, but I have a vague memory of gnome/mutter running on a single main thread which used to lock up quite a lot (javascript etc). And because in X it was X that used to manage things like rendering the mouse pointer every frame, whereas in Wayland it flipped to mutter having to do it directly, the stalls were way more obvious in wayland than X, which is where I think a lot of this perception came from.

Again, not sure how much of this is accurate, but that's the point I was trying to make.

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

#85

Post by nikodunk »

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

I use Bazzite for development bc it works like a Mac with sane defaults and a just works approach:

- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.

- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.

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

#86

Post by marcinostefano »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #74
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 tha…

Why not for developers? You can install tools from flatpak or in home directory. My workflow includes toolbox containers. Distrobox is also good option.

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

#87

Post by doix »

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.

This is the complete opposite of those discussions. It's taking a specific quantifiable thing and measuring it, with enough information for anyone to try and reproduce the results.

It's the epitome of science, comparing it to a generic vim vs emacs flamewar which is pure subjective opinion is pretty baseless.

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

#89

Post by wing-_-nuts »

marinhero wrote: post #24
prhn wrote: post #11

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…

I moved to OpenSuse and have the same experience/opinion. The only caveat I had in Wayland is Game Streaming. Sunshine/Moonlight work but the input lag is noticeable and there are artifacts in the game. I go back and forth between X11 and Wayland just because X11 better for game streaming but in time I'm sure I'll go full-time into Wayland.

When you say game streaming, is this the steam streaming stack?

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

#90

Post by mikenew »

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…

Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time.

I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.

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