Ubuntu 20.04 Gaming Performance Across Desktops, X.Org vs. Wayland

[Guest]

Rent a secretary if simple tasks are too much for you.

Don't drink, think safely.

[Volta]

Don't drink, think safely.

Get a lobotomy.

[Volta]

Oh, yeah, imaginary Xorg bugs and use cases for 0.1% of users out there. Wayland fans are obsessed with them for the lack of any strong arguments. Oh, Firefox finally has HW video acceleration (to be honest it does not - it's only in alpha builds). Oh, guess what, mplayer/mpv has had it for years working perfectly under Xorg. I don't give a fuck about Firefox developers not investing any time into it because HW video acceleration under Linux just sucks regardless. Under Windows people had it from day one in IE, Firefox, Chrome and all other web browser. In Linux ... well, it's VDPAU/VAAPI/what else and a lot of mess.

A f*cking bird's brain! That explains a lot. And your argument is: Wayland games are slower, but there were no Wayland games tested. That's just simply unbelievable how low can one fall. I wonder when key logger 'helper' was fixed in XORG:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/115669/setting-to-protect-gnome-terminal-from-key-logging

or perhaps it was not?

[xpander]

Did MATE have its own compositing enabled?
From my testing on GTX 1080Ti MATE performs the best (without the stupid compositing from marco)
Though i haven't tested all the DEs listed here. Just Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon and MATE. And all with X not Wayland.

[birdie]

birdie have you ever used gnome with wayland ? it is much snappier and "micro tearing free". At the moment I have a navi 10, multiple intel igpu running on wayland. and a nvidia quadro t1000 running on gnome with x11. even with the latest driver 440.82 and full sync pipeline thingy on the x11 gnome is less smooth then all the other cards with wayland - even the igpu on the very same device is snappier. Of course if I switch back from wayland to x11 I have the same behaviour on amd and intel aswell. This are different rigs and different distros. I'm very sensitive to microlags, stutter etc fps ...but some people arent so maybe you are not able to recognise it?

I last tried Gnome in 1999. Never had a desire to come back to it. It's created by the people who actively want to complicate my life and remove all possible configuration options. I used KDE 3.5.10 up to 2018 and then switched to XFCE because KDE 3.5 can't even connect to modern websites and needs patching. TDE works but I'm not a fan of their approach (instead of keeping KDE3 afloat, they renamed all the internal Qt3 classes/methods/functions and made their patches incompatible with KDE3.5).

[Volta]

I last tried Gnome in 1999. Never had a desire to come back to it.

While Gnome is currently an only Wayland ready desktop.. that's good to know. Now get lost you POS. And this POS dared to say:

Oh, yeah, imaginary Xorg bugs and use cases for 0.1% of users out there. Wayland fans are obsessed with them for the lack of any strong arguments.

[CochainComplex]

Get a lobotomy.

The cure for everything back in the 40ties...If I see trump nowadays I wish they would try to cure him with that aswell

[Citan]

I don't think Wayland is fundamentally designed badly. What it is, is incomplete.

My two central theses are: (1) To overhaul a display system will require more than a decade, and (2) backwards compatibility is paramount.

XWayland will be absolutely critical to the success of Wayland, because proprietary applications exist on Linux (pro tools like CAD; games; legacy line of business apps), and because even open source projects take significant time to adapt to a new display system. Wayland will be ready for prime time when XWayland is feature-equivalent (and absent any breaking bugs) with native Xorg -- but not before.

This struggle is not unique to the Linux desktop. We're trying to solve a hard problem that others have gone through before.

The old Windows XP graphics system took about 10-12 years for Microsoft to replace, and that's with a lot more focused/concentrated development. They got it so wrong that -- if I remember my history correctly -- the graphics stack is a major reason why the "Longhorn" pre-release of Vista had to be scrapped and rewritten mid-development.

Then, Vista's production release ended up being a lot more like XP than they wanted, and it basically took until Windows 10 to eliminate the pre-WDDM stack. And they still go through an unthinkable amount of contortions to maintain ABI and API compatibility with old Windows binaries that use GDI+ and such, which is their equivalent to XWayland on Linux.

So to replace XP's graphics stack with a new composited graphics stack ended up taking well over a decade for a company whose livelihood has been built on having a stable GUI-driven desktop.

In my opinion, the consistent push from Red Hat and Canonical, and eventual Nvidia driver support for accelerated windows in XWayland will result in an inevitable transition to Wayland. But by no means should your average Linux user just stop running Xorg and switch to Wayland today. I would guess we are still at least 1-2 LTS releases of Ubuntu (so, 2-4 years) away from Wayland as default, with Nvidia driver support being the biggest determinant. BUT, that doesn't mean Xorg is going away.

I would conservatively say that the Xorg display server has about 10 years left of wide adoption. I would say that the X11 protocol as it is used in applications has at least 30 years of life left in it, meaning it will be totally normal 20 years from now to still run a lot of X11 processes in XWayland. But by then, XWayland should be so smooth that you won't even notice you're running something on XWayland vs. native Wayland. Just like you don't notice when a Windows app is running on GDI+ vs. the newer stuff (Direct2D/Direct3D, etc.)

Most (only?) constructed and constructive post of the whole thread of everything I've read so far.

Indeed, you cannot expect to change such a fundamental component of how one can use an OS in less than 15 years, and that's with adequate amount of resources involved...

[Volta]

The cure for everything back in the 40ties...If I see trump nowadays I wish they would try to cure him with that aswell

It's depressing to realize not so long ago there were such practices. Knowledge should always be the most precious thing in the World.

[Davidovitch]

After 8 pages of discussion, I think this is the most sane comment of all.

Most (only?) constructed and constructive post of the whole thread of everything I've read so far.

Sad, isn't it? O moderator, where art thou? My kingdom for a moderator and/or a post rating mechanism à la Ars Technica.