AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance At Parity Between KDE Plasma 6.0 X11 vs. Wayland

[Nocifer]

simplescreenrecorder, avidemux, kaffeine or smplayer among others

Nowadays, lack of Wayland support is mostly due to the developers' lack of time and/or effort (and sometimes the will) to port their software, because apps that interface with the video and/or graphics stack are inherently some of the most complex and time consuming to bring over to Wayland, and not due to Wayland's lack of support (minus some non-essential niggles). But that should change now that Wayland has been made the default display manager going forward.

global shortcuts

Same as above. Global shortcuts do exist in Wayland in the form of a portal, it's just that most apps haven't bothered yet to implement support for it because X was the established default and so they've kept postponing the day when they'd have to sit down and dedicate the time and effort required to do so. That's to be expected, after all when e.g. cars first came along most "fuel stations" were still selling hay and didn't bother with petrol because hay "just worked" and most of their paying customers still made heavy use of it. It was some time before everyone involved realized that cars were the future and they devoted time and effort to change their long-established habits.

[Vermilion]

Ive had a few projects that Ive piled more effort than I would have liked into refactoring stuff on the promise of better performance, only to be left gutted when that better performance didn't materialise.

But the scale of this wayland flop must be unprecedented in software engineering.

All that effort to at best par what has existed for years/decades before, damn thats gotta sting.

Except, raw performance is not the only useful metric. I sure appreciate no rogue app keylogging or snooping on my running windows.

That, and you're missing that these benchmarks are mainly comparing X11 and Xwayland, aka the compatibility layer. Having little to no overhead with a compatibility layer is in itself a win.

[Classical]

Impressive mind sharing the benchmark you are talking about?

You can test this yourself. Use Intel 12 Gen or newer in combination with an RX 7000 generation GPU. Take the test on Alpine Linux.

bspwm outperforms every Wayland desktop/wm in Xonotic (the Flatpak version)

For Steam games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, War Thunder, etc it is either KDE Plasma X11 or bspwm that outperforms any Wayland desktop/wm.

KDE Plasma X11 performs well in War Thunder, but in almost all other Steam games I tested, bspwm is the winner.

Although sway wm is a fairly large project with almost 500 developers, I have to say that many Steam games that work perfectly in bspwm do not run on sway wm.

An example is Naraka: Bladepoint which does not run well on most Wayland clients.

In Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, sway wm has very poor performance, less than half of bspwm.

On Alpine Linux I see that popular Wayland desktops/wm either suffer heavy performance losses at times, or completely crash in games that run fine on bspwm.

[Classical]

It's not in every game that I see that poor performance from Wayland.

For example, river wm performs well in the game 0 A.D. but in general my comment above is correct.

[SSJBurger]

You can test this yourself. Use Intel 12 Gen or newer in combination with an RX 7000 generation GPU. Take the test on Alpine Linux.

bspwm outperforms every Wayland desktop/wm in Xonotic (the Flatpak version)

For Steam games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, War Thunder, etc it is either KDE Plasma X11 or bspwm that outperforms any Wayland desktop/wm.

KDE Plasma X11 performs well in War Thunder, but in almost all other Steam games I tested, bspwm is the winner.

Although sway wm is a fairly large project with almost 500 developers, I have to say that many Steam games that work perfectly in bspwm do not run on sway wm.

An example is Naraka: Bladepoint which does not run well on most Wayland clients.

In Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, sway wm has very poor performance, less than half of bspwm.

On Alpine Linux I see that popular Wayland desktops/wm either suffer heavy performance losses at times, or completely crash in games that run fine on bspwm.

Ahh so no actual benchmarks.. sad times I was hoping to see them. I am using Windows atm due to my VR Development but when I was gamin on linux Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, World of Warcraft they felt smoother under Wayland and the framerate was identical. When going from Windows to KDE Wayland playing Apex Legends and Halo Infinite my aim felt consistent and obv a bit smoother on Wayland with an AMD GPU.. Going from Windows to X11 my aim felt off. But each one of our posts here is us talking about our experience and not real benchmarks.

[Rovano]

I have to admit that Plasma 6 and its apps work almost perfect on Wayland, but what perfect is it when a lot of the applications I used don't work now? simplescreenrecorder, avidemux, kaffeine or smplayer among others. What about global shortcuts? I'm seriously considering going back to the old, solid and not secure at all X11 graphic server. I think it is still too early to use Wayland.

Of the above, I only use SMplayer.

What exactly isn't working for you?

I don't have X11 installed on my computer and everything works including the various output drivers in Smplayer.
But I have a nvidia gpu.

[mSparks]

Except, raw performance is not the only useful metric.

By far the most important metric is how much easier it makes developers lives.
You can easily measure that by how many developers adopt it as their primary development platform.
15 years in and the only significant movement there recently was by the PCSX2 devs....

I sure appreciate no rogue app keylogging or snooping on my running windows.

I'm quite sure no one cares, quite the opposite tbh, streaming is a significant use case for desktops. You say "no snooping on my running windows" everyone else sees and hears "incapable of streaming".

That, and you're missing that these benchmarks are mainly comparing X11 and Xwayland, aka the compatibility layer. Having little to no overhead with a compatibility layer is in itself a win.

Not really, pure wayland doesn't offer any tools for hardware acceleration outside of that offered by Mesa, and seems in fact to have a greater tendency to often fall back to software rendering, which is never going to excel in any benchmark ever.

[anda_skoa]

You say "no snooping on my running windows" everyone else sees and hears "incapable of streaming".

Those are not the same thing.
Streaming is an explicitly allowed sharing of screen content, snooping is the sharing of screen content (or keyboard strokes) without permission.

Streaming does not imply snooping and, vice versa, the absence of streaming does not imply the absence of streaming.

Not really, pure wayland doesn't offer any tools for hardware acceleration outside of that offered by Mesa

There is no difference between Wayland and X11 here.

In both cases clients render hardware accelerated through an OpenGL or Vulkan library.
In both cases the handle to the resulting buffer is passed to the respective compositor (in Wayland's case directly, in X11's case indirectly via the X server).
Which then use the same APIs to do their hardware accelerated compositing.

[mSparks]

Streaming is an explicitly allowed sharing of screen content,

Wayland offers no such functionality, non wayland devs have put some effort to hack it in, and they all do it differently, to various degrees of success.

X11 offers this functionality explicitly by means of Linux uid r/w/x permissions to the underlying bytestreams.

There is no difference between Wayland and X11 here.

Well, there is at least one important difference, about 30 years of development time, resolving security issues/requirements and bug fixing.

[Weasel]

I was asking why you think that would be a problem? I'm pretty sure input IPC is pretty cheap and fast. Browsers do it for website isolation as well. What use-case for child windows do you have in mind that has higher latency requirements than webgl games?

As for the question of why the Wayland protocol does not allow child windows: I guess in order to keep server complexity low. If stuff like that can live in some client library, then it should.

Playing Windows games in a Wine virtual desktop...?