KDE's Plasma Wayland Session Achieves Better Battery Life Than With X.Org

[Leinad]

Proof that X.Org has too much overhead...

Looking on CPU temperature results, you probably meant "too much overheat" :-)

[schmidtbag]

I imagine the wattage difference changes quite a bit when:
A. There are more screen redraws
B. As resolution goes higher
C. If Xwayland is in use

[Myownfriend]

Well, actually in most of the cases Xorg has better performance. So in performance per watt cases I don't there will be that big of a difference.

It should be noted that these applications are all running through XWayland which is gonna be detrimental to the Wayland sessions performance and battery life to some extent. Even then, X.org only has an 8% lead at most in these benchmarks while running a Wayland session shows a 15-19% difference in battery life so performance per watt is still very much in Wayland's favor.

[s_j_newbury]

It should be noted that these applications are all running through XWayland which is gonna be detrimental to the Wayland sessions performance and battery life to some extent. Even then, X.org only has an 8% lead at most in these benchmarks while running a Wayland session shows a 15-19% difference in battery life so performance per watt is still very much in Wayland's favor.

I really don't understand why Michael always does this. Yes, currently for Steam games you're probably going to be using Xwayland for now, but any native game outside the Steam runtime will probably be able to run native Wayland via SDL2, even many SDL1 games now work natively under Wayland with the wrapper.

[s_j_newbury]

I really don't understand why Michael always does this. Yes, currently for Steam games you're probably going to be using Xwayland for now, but any native game outside the Steam runtime will probably be able to run native Wayland via SDL2, even many SDL1 games now work natively under Wayland with the wrapper.

Why not benchmark some native Wayland games without using Xwayland?

[Volta]

well I don't know..
Xorg seems to be consuming more power, but it seems that xorg is also more performant in games, also Xorg, maintains your laptop cooler for what we see in the graphs..

Did you see a native Wayland game to make such assumption? Using more power while being cooler same time. That's some quantum physics.

[tornado99]

I tried out plasma on wayland last week on Manjaro stable. Couple of things were still broken. HiDPI just didn't work, my touchpad settings from Xorg were not honored in wayland (I configured the settings in Kde system settings). I know it is Linux and you gotta do it yourself but I think the you-gotta-do-it-yourself aspect should be an opt-in. I mean I would call it production-ready when I just need to flip the switch in Sddm login screen and it works. I may be asking too much here.

I use 200% scaling on my 4K monitor and switching to Wayland is just one big blur-fest, whereas Xorg everything is rendered very sharp.

[Britoid]

Well, actually in most of the cases Xorg has better performance. So in performance per watt cases I don't there will be that big of a difference. Xorg might have overhead but it also have years of optimizations lacking in Wayland.



Pipewire is supposed to be this magic thing.

Xorg itself will only have better performance due to years of optimization whilst Wayland compositors are still maturing in that regard.

[Myownfriend]

I use 200% scaling on my 4K monitor and switching to Wayland is just one big blur-fest, whereas Xorg everything is rendered very sharp.

I do the same thing on Gnome and it doesn't look blurry to me at all. In fact I get the opposite because X11 requires that both displays get drawn at the same scale and then scaled down differently so the lower DPI display goes blurry.

Are you sure the the applications you're running are native Wayland applications? If they're running in XWayland then they'll be blurry because XWayland doesn't support DPI scaling.

[tornado99]

I do the same thing on Gnome and it doesn't look blurry to me at all. In fact I get the opposite because X11 requires that both displays get drawn at the same scale and then scaled down differently so the lower DPI display goes blurry.

Are you sure the the applications you're running are native Wayland applications? If they're running in XWayland then they'll be blurry because XWayland doesn't support DPI scaling.

This is a system-level problem. The desktop, icons, window controls, dolphin file browser in KDE are all blurry. the suggested fix is to use a forced font dpi of 192 instead of 96 which sorts out the text, but you aren't using the hidpi icon assets.