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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

#121

Post by michaelmrose »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
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…

With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland. The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a…

It's very valuable data that everything is so close. It means that most folks can simply ignore it. On the other hand the inferior nature of xwayland well explains the bad rep for wayland latency.

Consider also that people neither run the latest thing nor the fastest software and remember potholes long after they are filled. EG it wasn't that long ago that wine was running on xwayland almost exclusively for instance and the majority of popular titles run via wine.

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

#122

Post by _kidlike »

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.

I've set up sunshine + moonlight on Fedora KDE Wayland, and I've played remotely from a different country with unnoticeable input lag (using a gamepad, playing Cyberpunk). The whole thing is even behind WireGuard.

I have very fast internet on both sides, both fiber to the home, with only the tablet running moonlight being on WiFi.

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

#123

Post by horsawlarway »

jandrese wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland. The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a…

The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.

ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation.

And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other.

---

Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.

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

#124

Post by _kidlike »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #89
marinhero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

sunshine + moonlight is the streaming stack. Steam's one is pretty bad, and still only works in X11.

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

#125

Post by seba_dos1 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #104
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...

Is this some kind of Pavlov's dog reaction? That's not what my comment was about, and even if it was it wouldn't make any sense anyway as KWin had good results in these measurements.

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

#126

Post by hoechst »

inigyou wrote: post #97

This website uses IP address blocking to censor itself, and deserves to be publicly shamed for it. Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/hrYZ6

Hello, this is my website and I do not know what you mean by this. If you give me technical details (like the subnet your operating out of), I can take a look at it.

My webserver is using crowdsec (https://www.crowdsec.net) to ban malicious IPs and I would guess that you are somehow unintentionally affected by this.

You can also test your IP by entering it into the crowdsec website to see if it is affected.

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

#127

Post by tadfisher »

admax88qqq wrote: post #94
marcinostefano wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

mostly i'm trying to get out of the terminal and most IDEs don't understand devbox/distrobox well without lots of finagling.

Why Nix is great; you can run the IDE from within a Nix-managed dev environment and not have to teach the IDE about it. You can point a .desktop shortcut at it too.

Requires a different way of working with projects though, so understandable if that's not your thing.

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

#129

Post by seba_dos1 »

retatop wrote: post #42
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.

Isn't Wayland always one frame delayed compared to Xorg to avoid tearing or has that been changed? If so, his very high refresh rate would minimize that effect

Tearing can theoretically improve latency for the part of the screen that's below the tear, but in any case where you could actually benefit from it the difference would be at least order of magnitude smaller than the duration of one frame.

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

#130

Post by uecker »

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…

And all the gaslighting. Using X forward basically every day but being told it is useless and broken and nobody needs it...
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