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

[qarium]

Probably my biggest learn in the last 12 months or so is the importance of time wrt user feedback.
Doesn't matter how good you think your code is written, or how well you think you designed it, or how well you think you tested it: Code isnt suitable for production until it has been hammered extensively by 10s of thousands of people in a process that takes decades (mostly because many of them get pissed at stuff not working/doing what they want, then check in a year or two later to see if what pissed them off is fixed - and only then actually complain if it wasnt and the project is still active)
X11 is well passed that - most notably with XCB.
Wayland hasnt even started that process yet, the lack of complaining when wayland was made default was interpreted as people being happy with the default rather than them just changing the default and quietly getting on with the day job.

what do you mean by "time wrt user feedback" i did google it and it results insomething like: "real-time feedback from your customers"

well you are right that x11 passed this phase long time ago and Wayland is still in this process.

but focus your attention on "what-pissed-them-off" of people is honestly a waste of time.

[mSparks]

what do you mean by "time wrt user feedback" i did google it and it results insomething like: "real-time feedback from your customers"

well you are right that x11 passed this phase long time ago and Wayland is still in this process.

but focus your attention on "what-pissed-them-off" of people is honestly a waste of time.

wrt = with respect to

The full term is the 80/20 rule aka (also known as) the Pareto Principle

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

the reason that last 20% to get to production ready takes 80% of the time is almost entirely because of the time it takes to collect actionable user feedback.

[mSparks]

no absolutly no one ever expected Xwayland to outperform X11... the only expectation in performance was native-wayland should outperform x11.

Xwayland is legacy only code. no sane person should ever be interested in legacy-only code

"and to hard to develop for"

no one ever expected a easy-to-develop-for solution because they did know that as soon as they want to increase security it will automatically become hard-to-develop-for.

any person who thinks you get security for free and this "easy" is an insane person.,

That was the pitch for why time and money should be invested in wayland to replace X11, hindsight is a wonderful thing, see also

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10179

"xwayland is only legacy code"

alternatively

the reason X11 has the large and diverse userbase it has is because it has incorporated a large quantity of feedback from a large number of people with a diverse set of requirements over a very long period of time. Ditch any one of those requirements and you also ditch the users that want/need it.

[piotrj3]

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/piglit-opengl-conformance-test-seems-to-really-give-nvidia-drivers-grief/44967/2

Turns out when you go and double check Nvidia claimed opengl support things go south quickly. Lot of ways Nvidia like Volkswagen before emissions scandal. They use work around to make themselves past and when you test without the work around they are not up to standard.

Conformance doesn't mean supports everything perfectly, generally conformance means you support X, Y, Z etc. features, any significantly big piece of software will have errors. Here on phoronix we had AMD GPUs failing to play GTAV on Wine/Proton (nvidia was fine), RustiCL despite having excellent start, had to iron some bugs, etc. If you look at google you can find significant number of crashes during various workloads for Opengl, directx, Vulkan etc... There is too many examples. None of companies are perfect here.

I am saying that something as simple as opengl calls implicit sync being not synced, would end up horribly in heavy majority of games using opengl. In Wayland present case it is simply Nvidia not signalling properly they didn't finish rendering yet and something reading not probably finished rendering buffer.

[piotrj3]

what do you expect of Xwayland ? it is a legacy codepath... wait until Wine/Proton has wayland support then you see all the windows games in wayland mode and only then you see faster performance also keep in mind that the change from implicit sync to explicit sync also ingrease the performance a little.

Yes, but there are 4 advantages Wayland possibly could have:

1st. Xwayland doesn't support all things X does, so technically it might have certain performance advantages from simply having less features.
2nd. X technically always puts all graphics calls into single queue. Modern GPUs do support execution of many queues. This could improve utilization. Even if Xwayland puts stuff in one queue all stuff outside of X (like DE, etc.) could be another so potentially DE is less blocking stuff from Xwayland.
3rd. Modern GPUs have hardware accelerated scheduler. In windows known as HAGS. Now HAGS don't always improve performance, sometimes it makes it worse, but sometimes it improves quite a lot, potential area to investigate and improve performance again with.
4th. Maybe utilization of SAM (smart access memory) or known as resizable BAR ( i know it is more driver level, but modern things should be made more aware of it).

I know Xwayland's part of X won't have big performance increases - that is extremly unlikely. But Wayland's compositor probably should be more efficient at utilizing GPU comparing to X server composing. That is where that 1-2% i could expect.

[WileEPyote]

That was the pitch for why time and money should be invested in wayland to replace X11, hindsight is a wonderful thing, see also

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10179

"xwayland is only legacy code"

alternatively

the reason X11 has the large and diverse userbase it has is because it has incorporated a large quantity of feedback from a large number of people with a diverse set of requirements over a very long period of time. Ditch any one of those requirements and you also ditch the users that want/need it.

Nothing is preventing someone else from taking over on x11 development. Nobody seems to want to.

[ezst036]

xservers repository is about as active as any other mature piece of software that works and is in widespread use.

Clearly you didn't read what the discussion was. (Hint, it was a conversation about a person, an individual.)

xservers repository is about as active as any other mature piece of software that works and is in widespread use.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver

Also, the whole point of OSS is also that its not dependant on any one entity or contributor, if something is broken - fixing it yourself and sending upstream the changes isn't just possible it is actively encouraged.

Declaring an OSS project depreciated is about as meaningful as declaring the sun depreciated because you can only work the night shift - interesting talking point, but meaningless to anyone else.

Read post 34 in its entirety, not just the convenient part. I already addressed this.

[ezst036]

I meant that he's the one making releases now, instead of Adam Jackson.

https://twitter.com/who_t/status/1358633376513576963

Xorg (the X server running on hardware) has no maintainer, no-one committed to make releases, no-one willing to invest in it.

???

[oiaohm]

I am saying that something as simple as opengl calls implicit sync being not synced, would end up horribly in heavy majority of games using opengl. In Wayland present case it is simply Nvidia not signalling properly they didn't finish rendering yet and something reading not probably finished rendering buffer.

Nvidia has a lot of detect games apply correction quirks that AMD and Intel don't need because of the very problem..

[Library]

The input lag in Wayland is the reason I refuse to use it when playing certain games. Turning off the compositor in X11 seems to work better for my use case.
I hope this changes.

It is specifically noticable in Rocket League played via Steam + Proton to me.