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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

#111

Post by michaelmrose »

marcinostefano wrote: post #86
NelsonMinar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many flatpaks aren't actually maintained by the actual developer nor the normal way the package is normally used. You may have bugs that aren't present in the package that the dev isn't aware of or interested in fixing especially if they support a different channel and the bug relates to sandboxing.

There is also a risk that the person may be malicious from the start, sell out, or simply get malware. Given the nature of the ecosystem a malicious release to a previously safe package could propagate incredibly quickly.

Where there are multiple steps for a package to get from developers machine to yours and each is slow enough for malicious behavior to be noticed each step adds friction and decreases the chance of ultimate success. Where all steps are nearly simultaneous your risk multiplies with each step in which a different person has their hands in it and if any of them are malicious or compromised you are screwed.

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

#112

Post by wing-_-nuts »

saltcured wrote: post #95

The input latency that has been driving me crazy lately is the screen unblank latency to allow input to a program. E.g. I have an old laptop running a browser playing some internet radio stream. Eventually the screen blanker (without locking) activates. Some real life event makes me want to hit the space bar to pause music. But the modern screen blank has decided that it should eat/ignore key presses while blank. So…

Question, does your monitor have a KVM? Cause I definitely notice this behavior, even on windows and os x with my monitor. I believe it was the same way on linux as well but it's been a minute since I used linux on my desktop

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

#113

Post by ivanjermakov »

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…

> results will get reported back

Even better, most of the tech stack is open source and contributions are welcome!

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

#114

Post by pelorat »

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

Yes of course, but you need to do it via the package manager. You can't "sudo make install". If you build your own software and want to install it system wide, you need to flatpack/brew it or run it in a docker container.

(obviously you can modify the filesystem if you really really really want to).

Bazzite is gaming oriented version of Fedora CoreOs. There are many different versions. I am running bluefin.

I've tried a lot of desktop linux distros, and to be honest, immutable linux feels like the future. Anything you do can simply be rolled back. Break something? Just roll it back.

And if you run something like Bazzite, but want to try out Bluefin-Dx which is developer oriented, then you can rebase your existing installation. If you don't like it, just revert back to Bazzite with a single command.

However, it's desktop oriented. Don't run CoreOs on a server.

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

#115

Post by saltcured »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #112
saltcured wrote: post #95

The input latency that has been driving me crazy lately is the screen unblank latency to allow input to a program. E.g. I have an old laptop running a browser playing some internet radio stream. Eventually the screen blanker (without locking) activates. Some real life event makes me want to hit the space bar to pause music. But the modern screen blank has decided that it should eat/ignore key presses while blank. So…

Question, does your monitor have a KVM? Cause I definitely notice this behavior, even on windows and os x with my monitor. I believe it was the same way on linux as well but it's been a minute since I used linux on my desktop

This is actually a laptop with its builtin display.

Edit to add: I don't think it has too much to do with display latency.

It is some convolution of the desktop environment and display server deciding that keyboard input doesn't go to the focused window while it is in this nominal screen blank state. This Fedora 43 on a boring generic Thinkpad.

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

#116

Post by wing-_-nuts »

inigyou wrote: post #100
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 art…

And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.

By the time wayland becomes the default in xfce, maybe the wayland team will have added window positioning to the protocol...

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

#117

Post by bigcityslider »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #81
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.

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 art…

I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

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

#118

Post by mmh0000 »

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 fs thing isn't just Bazzite; it's a fork of Fedora Silverblue[1] (it sounds like AI wrote this, but it didn't! I fear I am becoming the AI...)

Immutable filesystem-based operating systems became fairly widely used as the "base" system for Kubernetes nodes. Because on a container-focused system, you never need to touch the rootfs.

This started as a project called CoreOS[2], which was eventually acquired by Red Hat for its OpenShift (Red Hat Kubernetes) platform.

On servers, immutable rootfs makes a lot of sense. Silverblue (et. al.) was an attempt to see if that concept translated to Desktop systems well. Reviews are mixed. Some people swear it's the best thing since bread. Other people claim it's worse than having dental work done.

I'm personally somewhere in the middle. I think the concept is good, but if you want to do anything to change the core system, like installing custom video drivers, it quickly becomes a pain. I like to equate it to the "n00b"-OS. People who "just want the damn computer to work", immutable is great, because neither they nor an application can do anything to really break the system. On the other hand, it really limits (without complex work-arounds that other systems don't need) what "power users" can do.

In "the perfect immutable OS world", you would never directly install any application; instead, you run everything in a container (i.e., Flatpak). So you have layers of protection: an immutable root and a container-based permission system; the worst* thing an application could do is blow up your home directory. But if you manage permissions correctly, the most damaging thing would be an application blowing up only itself.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...

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

#119

Post by amlib »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #81
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.

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 art…

> I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken

Yeah, because it wasn't ready. Pretty much no one recommended using it back them, if you thought it was ready you were either misguided or misled. It's time to put your skepticism aside and give it another try, there is a pretty good chance it's going to work great now.

Even Valve Steam OS is now adopting it. It's a pretty good sign wayland is a viable replacement for X11, while bringing it own things.

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

#120

Post by 0x457 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #109
0x457 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

I had to turn on performance mode for some fights in Expedition 33.

> Depends on the game. Many shooters have always targeted 60 fps (COD / BF iirc)

Define always. I don't know about COD, last COD I played on console was targeted 30 fps on PS3 and the same was true for every PS3 shooter. BF5 ran at 50fps on average. Battlefield is really an exception to the rule because they lowered graphics waaaay lower than on PC to get reach 60 fps. IIRC ps5 Pro can reach whole 120 Hz in BF6.

PC ports of Capcom games are always piss poor so no surprise there.

Biggest FPS surprise FPS for me was Destiny 2 where PvP damage to you was tied to your FPS.

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