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

[oiaohm]

Fact is Gnome with wayland only just became useful between 1-2 years ago and still took it well over a -DECADE- to get there. Fact is that even still to this day if you do anything moderately CPU intensive on -ANY- wayland compositor, including gnome, input lag becomes totally unusable even still to this very day.

That is not in fact true for the latest gnome or if you have allocated CPU resources correctly. High CPU load stalled out X11 in 2003 I have my notes from then.

FFact is the wayland desktop experience is still so incomplete that it can -ONLY- be used up till the point you need a feature it doesn't have implemented yet.

That is no different to 2003 where I would need particular opengl features and they did not work because the low level stuff was not done yet.

Fact is Hogsberg himself invented the term for wayland "lowest common denominator", I simply reused his asinine remark.

Really you did not understand Hogsberg usage of "lowest common denominator" Wayland objective is to cover that. X11 protocol does not have that objective and it does not cover important things like how clipboard works.

If you are measuring where X11 protocol vs Wayland Protocol by "lowest common denominator" features. Current X11 protocol is still the lowest common denominator with the least defined features.

Hogsberg objective of "lowest common denominator" is define in standard more features than X11 protocol does and not duplicate with existing protocols like AT-SPI2.

Fact is when X11 was exactly as old as wayland is -RIGHT NOW- xorg was already forked from xfree86 and heavily developed.

X.org fork off from xfree86 was because Xfree86 was fairly much not usable mess.

Fact is when X11 was 15 years old it was 2003 and desktop linux was at a marketshare height it hasn't reached before or since....

Fun fact I was using Linux desktop in 2003 and I have the logs of the reported issues.

Really its possible to get a 2003 distribution install it in a virtual machine and run for a while. I recommend you do so you take of your rose colour glasses. X11 was not in that good of condition in 2003. It was 2007 when x.org finally learns how to auto-configure itself.

2003 you are still in the time frame of the menu system between desktops being broken. Audio isssues form hell. If using Nvidia and you decide to run a complex program have have you complete desktop freeze as you kernel panics in background.

X11 starts coming reasonable like ir or not 2007-2008. So about 20 years old. Wayland starts when those attempting to repair X11 protocol wake up there are many parts they cannot fix so the only option is start fro scratch.

That the reality X11 took 20 years to get decent. A lot of the early people using the Linux desktop were willing to put up with worse than the current Wayland offerings that is reality.

[duby229]

There is no stuttering or cursor lag here. As for why I assumed you use Nvidia, well that's because it's always Nvidia that causes issues with graphics on Linux (especially with Wayland of course, but not only). Intel and AMD GPUs just work as expected.

Play a game or encode a video or compile a program. Just do something moderately CPU intensive and then the input lag becomes unbearable. It's ubiquitous across all wayland compositors. It's not capable of syncing output on input. CPU load exacerbates it to an unbearable degree.

[duby229]

That is not in fact true for the latest gnome or if you have allocated CPU resources correctly. High CPU load stalled out X11 in 2003 I have my notes from then.



That is no different to 2003 where I would need particular opengl features and they did not work because the low level stuff was not done yet.



Really you did not understand Hogsberg usage of "lowest common denominator" Wayland objective is to cover that. X11 protocol does not have that objective and it does not cover important things like how clipboard works.

If you are measuring where X11 protocol vs Wayland Protocol by "lowest common denominator" features. Current X11 protocol is still the lowest common denominator with the least defined features.

Hogsberg objective of "lowest common denominator" is define in standard more features than X11 protocol does and not duplicate with existing protocols like AT-SPI2.



X.org fork off from xfree86 was because Xfree86 was fairly much not usable mess.



Fun fact I was using Linux desktop in 2003 and I have the logs of the reported issues.

Really its possible to get a 2003 distribution install it in a virtual machine and run for a while. I recommend you do so you take of your rose colour glasses. X11 was not in that good of condition in 2003. It was 2007 when x.org finally learns how to auto-configure itself.

2003 you are still in the time frame of the menu system between desktops being broken. Audio isssues form hell. If using Nvidia and you decide to run a complex program have have you complete desktop freeze as you kernel panics in background.

X11 starts coming reasonable like ir or not 2007-2008. So about 20 years old. Wayland starts when those attempting to repair X11 protocol wake up there are many parts they cannot fix so the only option is start fro scratch.

That the reality X11 took 20 years to get decent. A lot of the early people using the Linux desktop were willing to put up with worse than the current Wayland offerings that is reality.

You're so full of Bullshit!

[Mario Junior]

There is no stuttering or cursor lag here. As for why I assumed you use Nvidia, well that's because it's always Nvidia that causes issues with graphics on Linux (especially with Wayland of course, but not only). Intel and AMD GPUs just work as expected.

I talking about GAMES. Try to play TF2 with a AMD GPU (mine is the RX570) using Wayland and see the disaster. Don't forget to disable vsync.

[jacob]

Play a game or encode a video or compile a program. Just do something moderately CPU intensive and then the input lag becomes unbearable. It's ubiquitous across all wayland compositors. It's not capable of syncing output on input. CPU load exacerbates it to an unbearable degree.

Simply not true. If you want to know, i *DO* have a video encoding running right now, on a relatively feeble CPU too, with no problems. I know that the problem exists but it's not inherent to Wayland, moving the mouse or windows doesn't take any more CPU than under X11 - quite to the contrary, in fact. BTW GNOME's Mutter has an undocumented feature where it runs the main UI thread with RR scheduling. It's not enabled by default (not yet at least, and certainly for good reasons) but I tried it for some time, without any observable issues... and the UI just flied, regardless of CPU load.

[jacob]

I talking about GAMES. Try to play TF2 with a AMD GPU (mine is the RX570) using Wayland and see the disaster. Don't forget to disable vsync.

I talked about my experience with Wolfenstein NO & OB. Last time I checked those were definitely GAMES, not office software

[duby229]

Simply not true. If you want to know, i *DO* have a video encoding running right now, on a relatively feeble CPU too, with no problems. I know that the problem exists but it's not inherent to Wayland, moving the mouse or windows doesn't take any more CPU than under X11 - quite to the contrary, in fact. BTW GNOME's Mutter has an undocumented feature where it runs the main UI thread with RR scheduling. It's not enabled by default (not yet at least, and certainly for good reasons) but I tried it for some time, without any observable issues... and the UI just flied, regardless of CPU load.

Are you using Arch or one of it's derivatives? I've been told by one other guy about some hacks they made to reduce the impact of input lag. (If I remember right they did something with cgroups to increase the amount of CPU time allocated to wayland under cpu load conditions, but I never looked into it. I just vaguely remember this guy mentioning it. It's not a true fix though, it's a literal hack.)

Anyway regardless of whether or not you personally notice it, it's most definitely there for certain. Wayland isn't capable of syncing output on input, the protocol would need to be redesigned and then extended to do it.

[andyprough]

Really its possible to get a 2003 distribution install it in a virtual machine and run for a while. I recommend you do so you take of your rose colour glasses. X11 was not in that good of condition in 2003. It was 2007 when x.org finally learns how to auto-configure itself.

He did not say that. He said that in 2003, "desktop linux was at a marketshare height it hasn't reached before or since". I wouldn't doubt that he's correct about that - roughly half the people locally in my industry were using some form of desktop Linux back then. I had installation disks, and was frequently asked to come to someone's house or office and help install SuSE. People used to buy a lot of PCs without an OS back then - something that MS made sure would not continue to happen.

Regarding your comments on the condition of the desktop in 2003 - KDE 3.x in 2003-2004 was a very nice desktop. I still use Trinity fairly often because I prefer some of the features that no longer exist with today's advanced desktops, I find it quite nice looking, and I like the workflow.

But, besides all that, I think what you've been posting today is very valuable information. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to everyone, I'm learning quite a bit more about wayland from your different responses to people's comments. Clearly wayland is the future for desktop Linux distros. Unfortunately it has been a slow-arriving future, but the technical challenges are very well documented, and there are no shortcuts. And I agree that it's much closer to an RC-quality release than an alpha-quality release. Today's benchmarks really show that.

[jacob]

Are you using Arch or one of it's derivatives? I've been told by one other guy about some hacks they made to reduce the impact of input lag. (If I remember right they did something with cgroups to increase the amount of CPU time allocated to wayland under cpu load conditions, but I never looked into it. I just vaguely remember this guy mentioning it. It's not a true fix though, it's a literal hack.)

Anyway regardless of whether or not you personally notice it, it's most definitely there for certain. Wayland isn't capable of syncing output on input, the protocol would need to be redesigned and then extended to do it.

Running Ubuntu 20.04. I don't know what you mean by "syncing output on input". As I said, I know that the lag problem exists in some cases, but it's not pervasive and not something that is inherent to Wayland. Under Wayland, both screen compositing and input processing are handled by the same process (unlike how it's done on X11) so it comes down to that process' implementation, the protocol is not involved in this. With X11 you *HAD THE IMPRESSION* that there never was a lag problem because pointer movement was handled by the X server which made it responsive regardless of how garbage the compositor was - but only the mouse pointer, not reacting to actual events. Early Wayland compositors such as Gnome Shell were ports of X11 compositors, which obviously didn't fare well (not properly multithreaded etc).

My only real-world experience with Wayland is with GNOME, until 3.32 reactivity and lag were (occasionally) a problem, by 3.34 it had improved substantially, on 3.36 it's better than it has ever been with a composited X11 desktop and on 3.36 with RR enabled is as close to perfection as it gets.

[tildearrow]

tildearrow Congratulations. Your assumptions made you censor obvious facts. As many times before it is historical proven and well documented how the Wayland Meritocracy works.
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland.../GOVERNANCE.md

I hate you.

Oh and I didn’t tell you to use GNOME instead of your current setup. Use weston or whatever you like.

Yes, you did. In a clever and indirect way.