Ubuntu 19.10 Is The First Time We've Seen (X)Wayland Gaming Performance Match X.Org

[jacob]

We would be there if Proton could be built without X dependencies

Not expecting native games doing so anytime soon.

Proton won't support that until Wine does, and Wine can't.
But that only concerns Windows games on Linux. For native games there won't be any excuse when Wayland is default.

[Hibbelharry]

So after 10+ years of development, you can barely show even 5% gaming improvement. I think it would be hard for anyone to claim this project as being a great success.

You know gaming improvements never have been the reason for developing wayland?

[phoenk]

In theory. In practice every game I know that is SDL-based uses it over X11 and probably hasn't even been tested on Wayland. If Ubuntu finally and permanently switches to Wayland by default in 20.10 then things may start moving at last.

Games using SDL2 generally don't talk to X11 directly, everything is routed through SDL2. SDL2 supports Wayland, and while X11 is still its default backend, many games are playable using pure wayland. Games using SDL1 or talking directly to the X11 socket are still going to be tied to X11 for the foreseeable future, however.

[jacob]

Games using SDL2 generally don't talk to X11 directly, everything is routed through SDL2. SDL2 supports Wayland, and while X11 is still its default backend, many games are playable using pure wayland. Games using SDL1 or talking directly to the X11 socket are still going to be tied to X11 for the foreseeable future, however.

That's beside the point. SDL2 games use SDL2 over X11, not over Wayland. Which games are playable in pure Wayland? Do you actually have some source or data for that claim?

[zxy_thf]

Proton won't support that until Wine does, and Wine can't.
But that only concerns Windows games on Linux. For native games there won't be any excuse when Wayland is default.

Supporting legacy systems (without adding cost) would be the biggest reason why native games won't support Wayland anytime soon.
This also happened on Windows (using DX9 when DX10/11 is default. Targeting Windows 7 after Windows 10 being release for a few years. etc)

[phoenk]

So after 10+ years of development, you can barely show even 5% gaming improvement. I think it would be hard for anyone to claim this project as being a great success.

I don't think you understand what the purpose of wayland is, if your metric is purely gaming performance. Wayland has been successfully in use for years now, both as an open source project and component of commercial systems. Wayland breaks into areas X11 isn't suited for, for example nearly anything that isn't a workstation. Samsung has been using Wayland as the display server for their various Tizen devices for years now, and mutter acting as a wayland compositor has opened Gnome to supporting features no one has ever supported on X11, such as certain trackpad and touchscreen gestures.

At this point, Wayland is in the "refining" stage of development. They're expanding to a somewhat new market area, and are flushing out various feature and performance characteristics to best suit the new market. To say the project is unsuccessful because it hasn't been ideal for your specific needs is invalid since they really haven't cared about your exact use case for the first 10 years of development. Where there has been effort to make Wayland awesome, Wayland has been awesome.

[phoenk]

That's beside the point. SDL2 games use SDL2 over X11, not over Wayland. Which games are playable in pure Wayland? Do you actually have some source or data for that claim?

I don't think you know what SDL is. Games don't "use SDL over X11." Games use SDL, and SDL talks to a display server on behalf of the game, for example Xorg or Mutter. The purpose of SDL is to abstract input devices and display servers away so developers don't have to care about them, useful for cross-platform development. A game written with SDL2 could theoretically run under Window's display server, macOS's Quartz, X11, Wayland, and the various systems implanted on consoles and mobile devices.

Per the arch wiki, you can tell games using SDL2 to use wayland by setting an environment variable. For games that bundle their own SDL2, if they haven't modified SDL2, you can LD_PRELOAD in your own version most of the time and use wayland through that. Yes it is more work and certainly not "out of the box," but it is far from simply not working at all, and shows a clear path for future proper support.

[jacob]

I don't think you know what SDL is. Games don't "use SDL over X11." Games use SDL, and SDL talks to a display server on behalf of the game, for example Xorg or Mutter. The purpose of SDL is to abstract input devices and display servers away so developers don't have to care about them, useful for cross-platform development. A game written with SDL2 could theoretically run under Window's display server, macOS's Quartz, X11, Wayland, and the various systems implanted on consoles and mobile devices.

Per the arch wiki, you can tell games using SDL2 to use wayland by setting an environment variable. For games that bundle their own SDL2, if they haven't modified SDL2, you can LD_PRELOAD in your own version most of the time and use wayland through that. Yes it is more work and certainly not "out of the box," but it is far from simply not working at all, and shows a clear path for future proper support.

Precisely because I know what SDL is (having coded with it), I know that any talk about backends and environment variables is totally irrelevant. People don't use LD_PRELOAD or give a sh!t about backends. People click on "Play" in Steam, period and full stop. Admittedly I haven't tried but I wouldn't be surprised if commercial titles released though Steam (those that use SDL2) had the X11 backend statically linked in and simply didn't even allow switching to Wayland (assuming that you could somehow install the Wayland SDL2 backend within the Steam runtime environment, which I haven't checked either) . Hence I repeat my question, which specific commercial games actually do really run on Wayland as of today?

[jacob]

Supporting legacy systems (without adding cost) would be the biggest reason why native games won't support Wayland anytime soon.
This also happened on Windows (using DX9 when DX10/11 is default. Targeting Windows 7 after Windows 10 being release for a few years. etc)

I think there is a difference in terms of market importance. Supporting DX9 on Windows means catering for an essential part of the clientele. Trying to support ${obscure_x11_based_distro_other_than_fedora_and_u buntu}, as far as games are concerned, induces considerable overhead and costs for an economic benefit dangerously close to zero point zero.

[dos1]

Precisely because I know what SDL is (having coded with it), I know that any talk about backends and environment variables is totally irrelevant. People don't use LD_PRELOAD or give a sh!t about backends. People click on "Play" in Steam, period and full stop. Admittedly I haven't tried but I wouldn't be surprised if commercial titles released though Steam (those that use SDL2) had the X11 backend statically linked in and simply didn't even allow switching to Wayland (assuming that you could somehow install the Wayland SDL2 backend within the Steam runtime environment, which I haven't checked either) . Hence I repeat my question, which specific commercial games actually do really run on Wayland as of today?

SDL2 by default tries to use system's SDL version even when it's statically linked - you can prevent it, but you really have to want to do it.

The real problem is that setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER variable globally will lead to broken games, because it also affects SDL1 - so the real solution is to wait until SDL2 starts to prefer Wayland backend over X11 (which won't happen until the situation around window decoration isn't somehow resolved).