GNOME 3.18 On Fedora 23: X.Org vs. Wayland Performance

[Danny3]

I don't get it
Why Wayland wins only in a few benchmarks?
Shouldn't it be a less overhead, bloat display server?
After all the time waiting it, I'm dissapointed.

[blackout23]

I don't get it
Why Wayland wins only in a few benchmarks?
Shouldn't it be a less overhead, bloat display server?
After all the time waiting it, I'm dissapointed.

Just read the comments above you by the nouveau (M?P?F) and Gnome (drago01) devs.

[yzsolt]

Awkwardly, the Wayland drivers for SDL2 don't draw window decorations. It makes it kind of annoying to use in windowed mode. In GNOME, you can still move the window by holding your modifier key (I use Super.) and clicking and dragging anywhere in the window, thankfully.

This is because Gnome expects clients to draw the decoration under Wayland. It's problematic with SDL, GLFW and other OpenGL windowing frameworks, because they'll probably never draw decorations - it's not their job. There's currently no solution: Wayland clients can't request decoration from the server, and even if they could, Gnome devs don't want to maintain the server decoration code in the compositor, so Gnome would just ignore the request. AFAIK KDE devs went for server-side decorations, so there's no problem like this on their side.
Gnome is my one and only desktop, but this little (?) issue somewhat annoys me. If you're a game developer and want your game to be displayed properly in windowed mode under Gnome and Wayland, you should use a toolkit - mainly GTK or Qt... Nobody will ever do that. I'm wondering what will be the solution once Wayland becomes the number one display protocol.

[Nobu]

Someone could just create a library for SDL2 games/apps that reads gtk themes and renders decorations when in a gnome environment. Or they can render their own and not worry about the toolkit--it's a game, who cares what the decorations look like?

[oleid]

Edit: wrong results, have a look at next page

[dungeon]

I just ran xonotic on my machine on wayland/gnome-3.18 and X11, both native:

Linked against SDL version 2.0.3
Using SDL library version 2.0.3
GL_VENDOR: X.Org
GL_RENDERER: Gallium 0.4 on AMD JUNIPER (DRM 2.43.0, LLVM 3.8.0)
GL_VERSION: 3.0 Mesa 11.1.0-devel (git-5cede90)
vid.support.arb_multisample 1
vid.support.gl20shaders 1
NOTE: requested 1x AA, got 0x AA
Video Mode: fullscreen 1920x1080x32x0.00hz

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland xonotic-sdl -benchmark demos/the-big-keybench
==> 10510 frames 76.3646130 seconds 137.6291923 fps, one-second fps min/avg/max: 28 150 280 (336 seconds)

and plain old X11 on gnome-shell/x11: xonotic-sdl -benchmark demos/the-big-keybench
==> 10510 frames 172.9266240 seconds 60.7772231 fps, one-second fps min/avg/max: 56 62 281 (336 seconds)

Obviously, the later is reduced to 60 Hz. Any idea how to change that?

$ cat .drirc
<device screen="0" driver="dri2">
<application name="Default">
<option name="vblank_mode" value="0"/>
</application>
</device>

And I set vblank_mode=0 in the env. At least glxgears is happy with this settings.

As you use oldish card with old r600 driver with old EXA accel i guess, you might want to disable SwapbuffersWait in xorg.conf

[blackout23]

I just ran xonotic on my machine on wayland/gnome-3.18 and X11, both native:

You should also try on weston. I had great results with it, since it also unredirects fullscreen windows which Gnome on Wayland does not atm.

[oleid]

Edit: wrong results, have a look at the next page

[leonmaxx]

for i in wayland x11; do for j in 1 2 3; do echo -n "$i $j "; vblank_mode=0 SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=$i xonotic-sdl -benchmark demos/the-big-keybench |& grep fps; done; done

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=$i

[oleid]

Edit: wrong results, have a look at the next page