Fedora 21 Gaming Benchmarks: X.Org vs. XWayland To End 2014

[Xaero_Vincent]

So just 5-10% slower, that looks fine

As a numbers of course, numbers looks fine... not that i want to use Wayland, let alone that combination

It's fine except for high-end games that tax the GPU. If older games run above 60 FPS on XWayland with modern hardware, it's fine because nobody will notice but some high-end taxing games, such as Civ:BE and Metro Redux cannot afford any FPS loss when the FPS with native X11 is already less than on Windows w/ Direct3D 11 or Mantle.

My understanding is that XWayland uses the GLAMOR driver for 2D operations via OpenGL. Does XWayland just use the native Wayland 3D graphics driver for 3D games ran within the embedded X server window? If so then it plausable to think that if native FOSS & proprietary Wayland 3D drivers can be developed to outperform the native X11 DRI drivers then the slight performance loss of playing closed-source games inside XWayland can be offset by higher performance drivers.

[kalrish]

Does XWayland just use the native Wayland 3D graphics driver for 3D games ran within the embedded X server window? If so then it plausable to think that if native FOSS & proprietary Wayland 3D drivers can be developed to outperform the native X11 DRI drivers then the slight performance loss of playing closed-source games inside XWayland can be offset by higher performance drivers.

AFAIU, all 3D rendering means are independent of X and Wayland, i.e., shared between them. There aren't "Wayland 3D drivers" nor "X11 DRI drivers", but "OpenGL (or whatever API it is) drivers" that program the hardware the same way, the only difference being in their output -- which is handled by GLX/EGL and ultimately by DRM. To account for the overhead, I don't know if this makes sense, but perhaps skipping compositing for full-screen windows...?, maybe that's already done.

[blackout23]

So much nonsense and half-facts in this thread lol. Everything you need to know:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?106957-XWayland-Linux-Gaming-Performance-With-GNOME-Wayland-On-Fedora-21&p=442389#post442389

[paintbynumbers]

Phoronix: Fedora 21 Gaming Benchmarks: X.Org vs. XWayland To End 2014

As some extra benchmarks over the holidays, here's some fresh numbers when running some OpenGL gaming tests on GNOME running natively on X.Org vs. GNOME on Wayland and the games running through XWayland...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg3NTI

Last time this benchmark was run I recall somebody saying there was a missing optimization to display composting when games were running full-screen via xwayland. Did that ever get fixed?

[Xaero_Vincent]

This is not the case. The reason for that is that games under wayland run composited (no matter whether there are running native or using xwayland). The performance "overhead" of xwayland is pretty much non existent. On X we do unredirect games so they do run uncompisted means that they run faster.

I do have patches for mutter to do the same on wayland (weston already does this btw.) but they didn't get finished in time for 3.14.

Has anyone compared game FPS performance with XWayland + Weston on Wayland versus Gnome 3 Mutter X11 session w/ full-screen compositing unredirect?

This would be interesting.

[Nobu]

I can get steam to run native in (Gnome Shell) Wayland, but: Civ5 only comes with a 32bit binary, and it won't run from steam or from a terminal. Rogue Legacy crashes (see below). Kerbal Space Program runs through xwayland no matter what (confirmed with xwininfo, which wouldn't give any info for a non-X surface). Haven't tried other games, like Xonotic yet. I don't have any other SDL2 games on steam, afaik (Portal uses SDL1, I guess, because it can't find the "wayland" videodriver).

Rogue Legacy (seems to be using mono):

System.DllNotFoundException: opengl32.dll
  at (wrapper managed-to-native) OpenTK.Graphics.OpenGL.GL/Core:GenFramebuffers (int,uint*)
  at OpenTK.Graphics.OpenGL.GL.GenFramebuffers (Int32 n, System.Int32& framebuffers) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.SDL2_GameWindow..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.SDL2_GamePlatform..ctor (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.Create (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at RogueCastle.Game..ctor (System.String filePath) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at RogueCastle.Program.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

ArchLinux, Mesa/radeon/kernel git.

Xonotic from Arch repos gives this error: "Quake Error: Failed to init SDL video subsystem: No available video device"

[liam]

Ugh. Xwayland SHOULD be as fast X, and potentially even faster as it can skip some copies and instead just pass handles, and also fewer context switches.
See lwn.net/Articles/491509/.
There was also discussion about this on this site with some of the developers. Iirc, they agreed that it was possible that xwayland could be faster than X but that expectations should be such to expect similar performance.
Lastly, did anyone notice that the frame timings were tighter with xwayland?

[Xaero_Vincent]

I can get steam to run native in (Gnome Shell) Wayland, but: Civ5 only comes with a 32bit binary, and it won't run from steam or from a terminal. Rogue Legacy crashes (see below). Kerbal Space Program runs through xwayland no matter what (confirmed with xwininfo, which wouldn't give any info for a non-X surface). Haven't tried other games, like Xonotic yet. I don't have any other SDL2 games on steam, afaik (Portal uses SDL1, I guess, because it can't find the "wayland" videodriver).

Rogue Legacy (seems to be using mono):

System.DllNotFoundException: opengl32.dll
  at (wrapper managed-to-native) OpenTK.Graphics.OpenGL.GL/Core:GenFramebuffers (int,uint*)
  at OpenTK.Graphics.OpenGL.GL.GenFramebuffers (Int32 n, System.Int32& framebuffers) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.SDL2_GameWindow..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.SDL2_GamePlatform..ctor (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.Create (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at RogueCastle.Game..ctor (System.String filePath) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at RogueCastle.Program.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

ArchLinux, Mesa/radeon/kernel git.

Xonotic from Arch repos gives this error: "Quake Error: Failed to init SDL video subsystem: No available video device"

So all these are games that work for you with pure X11 but fail with XWayland, except for Kerbal Space Program? This isn't good because XWayland should be able to handle any X11 application without fault.

BTW, obviously any 32-bit games should work on 64-bit Arch. You just need the multilib libraries.

[johnc]

Lastly, did anyone notice that the frame timings were tighter with xwayland?

It doesn't look like it. Other than a couple of blips on X.org.

[liam]

It doesn't look like it. Other than a couple of blips on X.org.

Those blips are my point. The max frame draw time was always smaller than X despite having a large min time.
I'm not a gamer but that's the kind of consistency you want.
Of course I'm not certain how many runs Michael preformed so those blips may be within error.