Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Session Performance Impact For Gaming

[jacob]

Like I said, you're making excuses. There is a reason why Phoronix is making these benchmarks and you're not getting it. Or more likely do you refuse to get it, because you cannot accept that people want to run their games under Wayland and want to see them run faster. So you stick your head into the sand and come with excuses. You're trying to buy time. How many more years will it take?

Well, it seems that unlike you I actually read and understand those benchmarks. Firstly the benchmark we are currently discussing here is about legacy X11 apps running under Wayland, not native Wayland apps; secondly it shows that with one single exception, there is no discernable difference in performance between that and native X11.
People always want to see their software run faster, in the present case it means that once that software stops relying on the X11 emulation layer it will run faster than it does now, which will also be faster than it runs today on pure X11.

You were saying?

[oiaohm]

Like I said, you're making excuses. There is a reason why Phoronix is making these benchmarks and you're not getting it. Or more likely do you refuse to get it, because you cannot accept that people want to run their games under Wayland and want to see them run faster. So you stick your head into the sand and come with excuses. You're trying to buy time. How many more years will it take?

That Wayland is different from X11 was never a secret, but the driving idea behind it. You only want to sell this now as something new, but it's always been like this. It's sad that you there even try to claim that it wasn't meant to succeed X11. It was always meant to do this. Perhaps you're trying to convince yourself of some imaginary scenario, where there is a good reason why it doesn't perform as well as it should, but no matter how different you imagine Wayland would be is it still a windowing system and it needs to perform fast or it won't find support. It doesn't matter how different or equal it is to other existing windowing systems. It needs to perform better and not worse.

Really its not that simple. The benchmarks Phoronix did were all games using xwayland there are games with SDL backend that you can switch the backend wayland so avoid the xwayland overhead so in fact go faster.

Also most of those benchmarks are inside the run to run error rate as in not more than 1 frame difference in performance also some of the benchmarks xWayland benchmark was faster than X11 server on bare metal.

Please note some of us have benched SDL games on wayland where you can change the backend to wayland. There is something interesting. There is a bug in X11 protocol that results in everything being at least 1 frame late. Please note I said at least it could be 2 to 3 frames late. This is something wayland protocol fixes.

So lets say wayland does work out at 1FPS slower but the person seeing under wayland that frame on screen 1 frame sooner than the person using X11 be it X11 bare metal or xwayland. That one frame per second slower in fact means nothing because the person using the wayland backend is getting to see the frames on time.

Other than the lack of variable refresh rate under wayland if a game has a direct Wayland backed you will play better if you choose to use wayland. It comes a debate when game only X11 backend if xwayland or X11 bare metal is better.

sdack you need to remember these benchmarks are xwayland on top of wayland you are reading. So if that is inside striking distance where do you think us using SDL based games that have a wayland backend in performance are in fact. So yes X.org X11 server is slow. Xwayland is slightly slower to equal and games on wayland itself are the fastest.

Wayland has delivered it promise just legacy support is not going to be faster. But xwayland is getting legacy support on Wayland inside native speed by optimising stuff out of xwayland it does not need.

Reality like it or not sdack current wayland compositors are not performing worse than X11 servers.

[sdack]

Well, it seems that unlike you I actually read and understand those benchmarks. Firstly the benchmark we are currently discussing here is about legacy X11 apps running under Wayland, not native Wayland apps; secondly it shows that with one single exception, there is no discernable difference in performance between that and native X11.
People always want to see their software run faster, in the present case it means that once that software stops relying on the X11 emulation layer it will run faster than it does now, which will also be faster than it runs today on pure X11.

You were saying?

No, there is nothing "legacy" about running games on Linux. Wayland would have to succeed X11 for games to become "legacy X11 apps", and according to you is this not the case when you say Wayland isn't supposed to support X11 (when in fact it is). You're not going to claim Wayland has turned Windows apps into "legacy Windows apps", or do you?

So it seems while you're still trying to make up your mind about what Wayland is, do you in fact want Wayland to be the successor to X11 when you give X11 apps the "legacy" status. Your problem only is that Wayland isn't a suitable successor and that we can only dream of a future where this is different, while we've been having this dream for more than 10+ years now and these benchmarks keep telling us that it remains a dream.

So who wants to use Wayland when the most demanding applications still run better under old X11? Only the dreamers do.

[sdack]

sdack you need to remember these benchmarks are xwayland on top of wayland you are reading...

Oh, I know. And you're adding more excuses to the pile. Nothing is changing these benchmark results.

[jacob]

No, there is nothing "legacy" about running games on Linux. Wayland would have to succeed X11 for games to become "legacy X11 apps", and according to you is this not the case when you say Wayland isn't supposed to support X11 (when in fact it is). You're not going to claim Wayland has turned Windows apps into "legacy Windows apps", or do you?

So it seems while you're still trying to make up your mind about what Wayland is, do you in fact want Wayland to be the successor to X11 when you give X11 apps the "legacy" status. Your problem only is that Wayland isn't a suitable successor and that we can only dream of a future where this is different, while we've been having this dream for more than 10+ years now and these benchmarks keep telling us that it remains a dream.

So who wants to use Wayland when the most demanding applications still run better under old X11? Only the dreamers do.

This is pure drivel. Wayland has nothing to do with Windows and it has nothing to do with X11 either. It's a graphics stack, not something to run "on X11". There is exactly 0 lines of code in the entire Wayland ecosystem that are related in any way whatsoever to X11, except for XWayland which is to Wayland what eXceed is (used to be?) to Windows or XQuartz is to MacOS.

There is nothing legacy about games on Linux but running anything X11-based on Linux (games included) is legacy. You don't whine about MacOS's Quartz being bad because X11 apps don't run as well as native apps on it, do you? Or do you? In fact as this benchmark shows there is basically no downside to running legacy X11 stuff on a Wayland-enabled system through XWayland, which is actually a pretty fantastic achievement. MacOS certainly doesn't come anywhere close to that in this regard. And I still don't get what you are whining about, precisely because as this benchmark shows, even the most demanding legacy X11 software (except for one) runs on top of Wayland with virtually no loss in performance or functionality.

[oiaohm]

Oh, I know. And you're adding more excuses to the pile. Nothing is changing these benchmark results.

I play xonotic lot this is first person shooter very latency sensitive. It is a SDL2 game that you can switch between pure wayland and X11 mode.

I am not adding excuses to the pile at all. I can tell you that xonotic does more frames per second in wayland mode and you don't have X11 being a frame behind problem.

There were no Wayland games in that benchmark but games that support Wayland do exist. . It the legacy games designed for X11 that are slow. Please note there are many legacy Linux games that were designed to use SDL2 that you just update the SDL2 library and they switch over to Wayland backend and pick up the performance boost.

Virtual Reality games due to DRM leasing it makes no different what so ever be it X11 or Wayland because the lease bi-passes both.

[sdack]

This is pure drivel. ...

Right back at you. Why do you even reply to it then, do you know? Of course you don't, but I can tell you why... you're trying to convince yourself of Wayland. So keep comparing it to MacOS or keep telling yourself it had no downsides. You're a dreamer. And don't worry about what I'm "whining about". It's beyond your abilities.

[finalzone]

i have 240hz monitor, thank you. and if your monitor is 60 hz, you can't have higher fps because monitor can't show you more than 60 frames per secons

What is baffling is why some people complain about the limit of frequency from their monitor vs a gamin app without restriction of displayed frames per secon. V-sync before and now freesync were made to adjust those. Those methods were done of both consoles and gaming arcade boards for a long time.

[jacob]

Right back at you. Why do you even reply to it then, do you know? Of course you don't, but I can tell you why... you're trying to convince yourself of Wayland. So keep comparing it to MacOS or keep telling yourself it had no downsides. You're a dreamer. And don't worry about what I'm "whining about". It's beyond your abilities.

I don't have to "convince myself" of anything because 1) unlike you I actually understand what I'm talking about (hint: Wayland is not a new way to run X11 software on Linux, which you don't seem to be able to comprehend); 2) unlike you I'm not a zealous fanboy who will stick to your misguided beliefs and cry "la la la not listening" even after more or less everyone on this forum has comprehensively debunked and demolished them; and 3) unlike you I can read and I've actually read the benchmark whose numbers still seem to evade you.

[intelfx]

Did you just tell us that GNOME won and it should be the only desktop?!

It's enough. You are A FREAKING DISGRACE.

*sighs* No, you know what... I can't tolerate this. I am going to delete your post.

Would you kindly fuck off and stop editing/wiping other users' posts just because you felt so?

Does this site has any kind of participation rules or something that would permit this kind of behavior?