A Look At The Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance With GNOME 3.30 X.Org/Wayland

[MrCooper]

What's left if you bypass the compositor if it is also the display server?

Direct display of the buffer provided by the client, same as with Xorg. As treba explained, a Wayland display server can do this in more cases than Xorg.

[blackout23]

Anyone managed to get GNOME/Wayland to run with the NVIDIA driver in the past 6 months? When the first EGLStreams support landed in mutter I played around with it by adding the nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to this kernel module. Now with the latest version of xorg-xwayland, NVIDIA and mutter I can't get it to work anymore.

[treba]

Games on Wayland will never reach games on Xorg performance on full-screened games because you can bypass the compositor on Xorg but not on Wayland. You'll get same performance on windowed games because the overhead exists on both cases.

That's wrong in both cases
On wayland in fullscreen you can use hardware planes (which for some reason is impossible on xorg), which is even faster than simply bypassing of the compositor (and also the cleaner solution). But neither gnome nor kwin support it, yet. For windowed applications it's even better: eventually xwayland will be faster than bare metal xorg. For everybody interested I can only recommend the following blog series from Daniel Stone: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-b...aphics-part-1/

tldr;: in general, Wayland is much better designed for modern technologies. Current compositors still lack many performance optimizations because they are still busy to catch up feature wise, which again is because they have to do things right, not in hacky, bug-prone and unsave ways how they were done in X.

Edit: Weasel you only get a seahorse (unfortunately without linebreaks and spaces):
\/)/) _' oo(_.-. /'. .---' /'-./ ( ) ; __\ \_.'\ : __| ) _/ ( (,. mrf'-.-'

Edit2: here's another good explanation about unredirecting fullscreen windows and what's possible with Wayland: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/bl...d-compositing/

[TheOne]

What I'm worry about is that now that the linux gaming ecosystem has matured so much we go back and angry up developers who have ported games to linux because now they have to support another display system. They surely use SDL or any other layer, but we aren't 100% sure if all those games don't make use of X11 in some way... Also so many applications written over the years that are still useful and may get stuck on X11 for years to come... So I would say it will take at least 10-15 years more to use Wayland with confidence , Also look how much Valve has invested on getting Virtual Reality working right in X11, is Wayland as capable and functional as X11 has become over the years?

[Weasel]

Wayland it's broken because it doesn't support X11 apps?

No it's broken because you can't do basic stuff like querying window positions. By design, not simply lack of features.

Well, Windows DWM and macOS Quartz doesn't support X11 as well. So this makes them broken?

You can query window positions on Windows (and many other features Wayland lacks).

[dragon321]

With other words: The overhyped Wayland is simply broken. How long have they been working on it ?

Wayland it's broken because it doesn't support X11 apps? Well, Windows DWM and macOS Quartz doesn't support X11 as well. So this makes them broken?

It's up to developer to ensure Wayland compatibility, not Wayland devs. A lot of toolkits already support Wayland. It's not Wayland fault that some apps using old toolkits (like GTK2 or Qt4) or have X11 only code. Wayland isn't another X11 implementation so that's why it doesn't support X11 apps native. This doesn't make it broken. How long they been working on what? They are not working only on X11 compatibility.

[omer666]

I am fully aware of this. Only playing stupid here - basicly the audience that Gnome targets at.

I don't think tastes in GUI are related to IQ, but whatever...

With other words: The overhyped Wayland is simply broken. How long have they been working on it ?

It doesn't mean it is broken. It means the transition between Xorg and Wayland is a tough one.

[coder111]

Seconded. This would be interesting to see.

Even if you only manage to run Dota 2 I think it would still be interesting enough for an article.

[darkbasic]

Most games still don't recognize it and then some of the older SDL2 ones that haven't seen updates in a while just crash.

Even if you only manage to run Dota 2 I think it would still be interesting enough for an article.

Of course you can, it's just not implemented yet in gnome-shell.

What's left if you bypass the compositor if it is also the display server?