X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Gaming Performance For NVIDIA GeForce & AMD Radeon On Ubuntu 22.04

[shmerl]

What does "focus on gaming" mean here?

Obviously features that are more important for gamers than let's say for other use cases. Adaptive sync, low latency, high general performance and so on are important. Mutter might prioritize use cases for general desktop usage more for example.

[Myownfriend]

Obviously features that are more important for gamers than let's say for other use cases. Adaptive sync, low latency, high general performance and so on are important. Mutter might prioritize use cases for general desktop usage more for example.

Do you have anything showing latency comparisons between DEs? Higher general performance? I thought we're talking about gaming in Wayland specifically and that Gnome was the DE with a focus on general usage? Again, do you have anything more up-to-date than the benchmarks I linked to that show that KDE is actually more performant in gaming than Gnome now?

[shmerl]

Do you have anything showing latency comparisons between DEs? Higher general performance?

I already linked you a bug that was clearly hindering gaming performance until recently. And lack of adaptive sync today is a clear indication it's not a priority for Gnome.

I'm not sure what you are arguing about. Come back when Mutter supports gaming features properly, then we can compare. For now if you want to play games, you are better off with X on Gnome (if you insist on using Gnome that is).

[mdedetrich]

I'm noticing that you didn't also point out that it used Gnome 40.5 instead of Gnome 41.

That's still the most recent gaming benchmark to go by. Do you have anything to backup that KDE has significantly improved in that time and that Gnome's performance has tanked? Are you willing to name what you think is the best Wayland compositor for gaming or are you gonna say what you think is the worst based on some things you heard?

Gnome has been supporting Wayland for a while where as KDE only started adding Wayland in Plasma 5.22.x and it being the first Wayland implementation it was pretty much alpha quality back then.

Point is if we are talking about Wayland, the difference between Plasma 5.22 and 5.24 is massive compared to Gnome 40.5 to Gnome 41.

Such a comparison isn't exactly fair.

[Alexmitter]

Listen kids, if you don't use a adaptive sync monitor, can you even call yourself a gamer?

Wanting the best in-game performing and most stable Wayland shell? No! What you need is adaptive sync.

[Myownfriend]

I already linked you a bug that was clearly hindering gaming performance until recently.

And? We established that that was fixed about half a year ago. I asked for comparisons. How is a resolved issue on Gnome's Git supposed to work as one? Point me to where that shows any latency of performance comparisons between it and KDE.

Going "Well, Gnome had a bug a while back that effect games, I guess that means KDE is a better DE for gaming" doesn't work.

And lack of adaptive sync today is a clear indication it's not a priority for Gnome.

1. Adaptive sync isn't a gaming feature. Adaptive sync is a generalized feature that would also benefit battery life on laptops so they can refresh their screens less when they're reading a webpage or watching a movie. It would also benefit the apparent smoothness of animations on very low-end hardware that can't always hit frame times for animations.

2. They've been working on adaptive sync since March of 2020. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutte..._requests/1154

The remaining problem they're dealing with has to do with cursor and application priority. Someone asked how KDE did it and the Gnome dev speculated this.

"They probably synchronize the monitor to compositor frame updates, which include any client frame or cursor movement for that matter. This effectively results in jitter when the cursor is moved while a client draws at a rate which is different than the update rate of the cursor's location. The jitter would be very apparent if you ran VRRTest and moved the cursor around. It may actually provide a worse experience than having VRR disabled entirely in such a case, which is what I suggested above as a temporary solution."

Then someone else found out that Kwin always prioritizes the cursor over the application so the application will experience jitter during mouse movement on KDE. Gnome's plan in the meantime might be to disable VRR when the cursor is on the screen.

So no. This isn't an issue of the Gnome team not caring. It's an issue of trying to implement it correctly.

I'm not sure what you are arguing about.

You're not providing any information to prove your statements while dismissing more relevant information that proves you wrong. You just prefer KDE and you don't want to admit that it could be worse for gaming.

Come back when Mutter supports gaming features properly, then we can compare.For now if you want to play games, you are better off with X on Gnome (if you insist on using Gnome that is).

Again, Gnome literally gets better performance using Wayland than on X11 and outperforms KDE's Wayland session. That's based on the only recent gaming comparison between the two that any of us can actually find.

As for the claim that KDE has lower latency than Gnome, I can't find any proof one way or the other. All I found was that tildearrow actually maintained a lowlatency fork of Kwin which seems to suggest that it had latency issues at some point. How they compare to Gnome though is completely up in the air.

I love that you're perfectly happy to say KDE is currently better (a comparative term) than Gnome at gaming, but don't think it makes sense to actually compare them right now. KDE's better for gaming by default in your brain and you're not really willing to look up if that's actually true right now.

[Myownfriend]

Listen kids, if you don't use a adaptive sync monitor, can you even call yourself a gamer?

Wanting the best in-game performing and most stable Wayland shell? No! What you need is adaptive sync.

Can't make use of adaptive sync if your games can run at the max frame rate of your monitor, right?

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[MadCatX]

Gnome has been supporting Wayland for a while where as KDE only started adding Wayland in Plasma 5.22.x and it being the first Wayland implementation it was pretty much alpha quality back then..

Plasma has been Wayland-capable for several years. Due to issues on multiple fronts unrelated to Plasma, Plasma 5.22 happened to be the first Plasma release that was mostly usable. While a lot of the most concerning issues are actually Qt issues, even 5.24 is not exactly a silky smooth ride as of now.

[Myownfriend]

Plasma has been Wayland-capable for several years. Due to issues on multiple fronts unrelated to Plasma, Plasma 5.22 happened to be the first Plasma release that was mostly usable. While a lot of the most concerning issues are actually Qt issues, even 5.24 is not exactly a silky smooth ride as of now.

I believe the first Plasma release to support Wayland actually predated Gnome first release with Wayland support but Gnome's support has been better over the years. I have no experience using Qt or Gtk but I've always heard of issues in software stemming from bugs in Qt. It gives me the impression that it's just altogether buggier.

[Volta]

Why Gnome shell? It's probably the worst compositor for gaming these days (on Wayland at least). I've heard multiple horror stories about performance, stuttering and etc.

It's probably the best one. However, games using engine broken by design (Unity) like 7 Days to Die stutter from some reason (they stutter on Windows too, but less). I didn't check on X, because game won't even launch. However, games with great engines like Serious Sam Fusion works like a charm on the highest settings. The same about The Witcher 3, X-Plane 11, Assetto Corsa Competizione. Maybe Unity's garbage collector messes something up.