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

[dos1]

SDL2 on Wayland does not support HiDPI yet and that's a huge issue for me. Because it takes in Windows being created at 4 times the size of the screen, if your desktop is in HiDPI "mode" :/

SDL2 does support HiDPI under Wayland. It was released with 2.0.10 IIRC. I wrote that support myself :P

However, SDL2@Wayland still has some quirks that need to be fixed. The most annoying one is that it quits at every change of any output properties - so better don't hot plug or change configuration of your monitors while you're in game

[MrCooper]

Most games are fine on GNOME 3.34 Wayland now, but there are still some that have serious frame pacing issues. Dark Souls II: SotFS through Proton is one such game. It's a stuttering mess in an (x)Wayland-session but works perfectly using X11. And no, the stutters will not show up in benchmarks but are blatantly obvious to the eye.

Not quite sure what causes it but that recent blog post by van Vugt mentions some issues that need work that could potentially fix this.

Sounds like maybe it ends up not hitting Xwayland's fullscreen path. Stuttering with windowed apps is a known Xwayland issue which is being worked on now: Issue #835 => Merge Request !316

[Ipkh]

Anybody defending the X window system these days doesn't remember or hasn't experienced it during the early Linux days. It was bad and buggy on Unix systems as well. Getting bugs fixed was an effort in futility and it was languishing as most Unix and Linux distros weren't really interested in desktop.

[DarkFoss]

Is freesync still disabled? No mainline kernel after 5.0rc2 has had it enabled.

[Brisse]

Sounds like maybe it ends up not hitting Xwayland's fullscreen path. Stuttering with windowed apps is a known Xwayland issue which is being worked on now: Issue #835 => Merge Request !316

That makes perfect sense because I can't get it to run in anything but a window in Wayland-sessions. I can set it to full-screen in the game's settings, but it runs in a window regardless.

[Vistaus]

debianxfce disagrees with this test lol

[Vistaus]

Blame Nvidia, not Wayland.



I believe Wayland support is planned for Wine afaik.

I think the big blocker is under Wayland, clients can't draw to exact co-ordinates on the screen, which Wine/Windows uses for menus. This isn't important for games though and you could probably work around by translating co-ordinates.

Wayland support has stalled AFAIK: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42284

"It is very unlikely that Wine is going to support Wayland in the same way as X. I worked on a Wayland driver for Wine some time ago, but discontinued the idea because Wayland lacks many features that are expected by Windows programs. [...]
The opinion from the Wayland developers is that you should stick to XWayland. The best solution Wine could offer, would be a virtual desktop that uses native Wayland. Not sure if it is worth the effort though."

[treba]

...Don't say security, that could have been fixed with a very simple interwindow security permissions extension...

Oh, why didn't you write it?

...I have looked at the X.org source code and could find nothing wrong with it. ...

Have you worked on it? Have you tried to solve the problems Wayland does solve? If not, why do you think you're competent enough to judge any of this?

...Its just astonishing...

...how narcissistic somebody must be to think [s]he knows better about Xorg than all the people working on it.

[TheOne]

While I feel the same about Wayland that I feel about ReactOS (soo many years in development and still not decently usable for many use cases), this are actually some great news!

[ssokolow]

The big reason we were given for Wayland was that X.org was just way too slow so we needed to have developers spend years of time which could be spent on other things reinventing the wheel.

Now that we know that this is a lie. what is the point of Wayland again?

Don't say security, that could have been fixed with a very simple interwindow security permissions extension.

Linux already had a perfectly useable and well designed Window system in X. I have looked at the X.org source code and could find nothing wrong with it. It just seems like a big excuse to reinvent the wheel. The X is bad nonsense is an urban tale that has been retold again and again, without basis in fact, to the point many people who say this really have no idea what they are talking about and just heard someone else say it on a message board and keep parroting it. Some of this started with Unix Haters Handbook, which is a long outdated book from 1988, almost everything in it is outdated, inaccurate or insignificant, which was meant as satire and even when it was written was knowingly inaccurate because it was not meant to taken too seriously. For instance, this was the origin of "X is big". Compared to what? The X servers size is quite small compared to Windows memory usage. Maybe X was big on 1988 hardware but any GUI system is going to be big on that hardware. On todays hardware 4 MB for the X server code is nothing. A similar thing has been happening with systemd. Almost none of what systemd-haters say about it is true. They just hear something on a message board and parrot it.

So this whole Wayland effort was based on a big pile of lies. Its just astonishing a lie can lead to such massive exertions of energy and unnecessary labor and effort.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)

Well, that and "Wayland is X12. They just didn't want to call it X12 because that would make traditionalists even more mad that requirements for a display system have changed so much since X11."