KDE vs. GNOME, X.Org vs. Wayland Radeon Linux Gaming Performance With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE vs. GNOME, X.Org vs. Wayland Radeon Linux Gaming Performance With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

For those wondering how the Radeon Linux gaming performance is changed between desktop environments when testing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out-of-the-box, here are some benchmarks. Not only is it looking at the performance between GNOME Shell 3.28.1 and KDE Plasma 5.12.4, but it's also comparing each desktop environment with its X.Org and Wayland session support. Additionally, these tests were done with both AMD Radeon Polaris and Vega graphics cards.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26280

[tildearrow]

Typos:

As far as the KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell performance for this aging but still popular OpenGL Linux gaming,

(you probably meant game)

The Deus Ex: Mankind Divded performance

The slower RX 50

(extremely slower!)

By the way, the Dota 2 2560x1440 benchmark is placed twice.

[microcode]

I wonder what the problem is with Mutter under Wayland.

[EarthMind]

I just love KDE Plasma. It's such a complete desktop environment

[AsuMagic]

> Though in the case of Wayland with the Steam Runtime build of SDL2 still not having the Wayland back-end enabled even if setting the SDL video driver environment variable, it largely comes down still to looking at the XWayland performance overhead where relevant.

Why not try with environment STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=1 SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland ? Am I missing something?
Edit: Sorry, STEAM_RUNTIME=0 not the former.

[Michael]

> Though in the case of Wayland with the Steam Runtime build of SDL2 still not having the Wayland back-end enabled even if setting the SDL video driver environment variable, it largely comes down still to looking at the XWayland performance overhead where relevant.

Why not try with environment STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=1 SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland ? Am I missing something?

At least last time I tried that while also setting the SDL video driver for Wayland env var, a number of games still would produce errors on start-up.

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Michael, what about a standalone X server?
An example of script I use to run Steam:

vblank_mode=0 XV_VSYNC=0 mesa_glthread=true steam -bigpicture

And I start this script from console with this command:

xinit previous_script -- :$XDG_VTNR vt$XDG_VTNR -keeptty &> /dev/null

u

[theriddick]

Using MATE now because it seems to be easier to get working with NVIDIA card for most things. Will move back to KDE once AMD release some top end cards able to compete with the 1080ti or above, and hopefully some vendors will release some ITX options.

EDIT: I did manage to get KDE working again, but it did require some workarounds to resolve problems. Seems ok now.

[R41N3R]

The results of KDE and Gnome are quite close on Xorg or XWayland, I think this is a good result and shows that there are no real gaps anywhere. Based on my experience the XWayland results have not been really smoth, frames look ok/good, but playing games was not always fun as of the lags and input issues. Hope this is better now with XWayland 1.20. Anybody knows which games can run natively on Wayland? Is there maybe somewhere a list?

[johnc]

I guess I'll just stick with X.org -- the finest piece of software ever written in human history.