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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

#101

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

It's really not like Emacs/vim. I use X because it works on my setup and always has, whereas Wayland has not, despite Wayland advocates claiming it's ready and X is deprecated for 10+ years.

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

#102

Post by bigcityslider »

doix wrote: post #87
datakan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can measure a 3.3ms difference, but whether someone will notice and care is a different thing.

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

#103

Post by inigyou »

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.

I guess you'd feel the same in i3 or Xmonad as well.

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

#104

Post by School-Cotton »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #12

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.

This is an annoying style of argument from Wayland fans.

Wayland fan: You need to switch to Wayland. X is deprecated and has been for years! Wayland is the future.

User: Okay, I tried, and it's broken/worse.

Wayland fan: No, you don't understand, Wayland is just a protocol. It's your implementation of Wayland that is at fault, not Wayland itself! Wayland is still great!

User: But X was working fine...

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

#105

Post by lightedman »

mikenew wrote: post #90
Aurornis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Try musicians that are used to playing extremely high speed semihemidemisemiquavers.

We notice latency. Neil Peart could almost get sample-precise timing, he was so godlike.

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

#106

Post by omnimus »

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

The immutable linux is pretty great if you find one that fits you type of dev work. The prebuilt images are powered by a config (so you could build your own) but it's great that you can just follow someones good "config". Switching/updates are suddenly easy.

For example i just need docker for webdev and there is bazzite-dx basically bazzite with docker and few things added. Works pretty great, sometimes when something goes bad i rollback the image and wait for future version.

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

#108

Post by lightedman »

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…

"Especially in competitive gaming, 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."

Depends on the engine. Anyone remember Quake 3's multiple of 3 frame rate speed hack?

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

#109

Post by wing-_-nuts »

0x457 wrote: post #65
Narishma wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's outdated information. Most PS5 and the equivalent Xbox games target 60 fps nowadays. It's usually huge news when a game is only 30 fps.

Well, new GTA is 30 fps only. Some (most?) games have performance vs quality toggle. Quality mode being 30 fps, and performance mode looks too ugly. Sure "only 30 fps" is big news, but pretty sure "quality mode target 30 fps" is still norm. In Xbox, many games launched at 30 fps only, then gained 60 fps mode. Until I see majority target at least 60 fps as minimal mode, my point IMO stands.

Depends on the game. Many shooters have always targeted 60 fps (COD / BF iirc). A single player game may well target 4k30hz unless the user selects 'performance mode'.

In the PC version Resident Evil 5, hit reg with a particular boss is tied to fps, so I had to lock it to 30. Going from 165hz to 30hz was noticeable, everything above 60 just felt a bit smoother to me but 30-60 was night and day. I rarely notice it when playing on console.

Ironically the only game where I've ever felt I had to enable performance mode was Life is Strange. Not the sort of game you'd think would suffer from 30hz!

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

#110

Post by sellmesoap »

I appreciate the article, it's cool to see such small differences across all those settings! It says they learned to solder, if you see solder joins that look like those in the first picture, keep learning! Those are some dry joins, which can easily lead to failure, or intermittant signal loss. Soldering can be a touchy sport!
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