X.Org vs. Wayland Linux Gaming Performance For NVIDIA GeForce + AMD Radeon In Early 2023

[qarium]

Nvidia doesn't give a shit about it, because it's a shit company with closed blobs. Wayland feels snappier and I don't see any major bugs even in KDE in 2023.

On Linux Nvidia is technologically 5 years behind AMD... X11/x.org is a Security Hole and Nvidia do not want to fix it.

see the benchmark results even a Nvidia RTX 3090 is slower than a AMD 7900xtx... so there is no excuse as a linux user to buy nvidia instead of AMD.

in most apps on amd hardware wayland is already faster and thats not even native wayland apps or games on native apps and games it will be even faster.

[dreamcat4]

Plus, gamescope+adaptive sync doesn't hurt.

lol yeah... i totally forgot to mention gamescope there. since apparently there is some way to use it with kde that would be so much worth trying out / testing in these scenario

[WannaBeOCer]

On Linux Nvidia is technologically 5 years behind AMD... X11/x.org is a Security Hole and Nvidia do not want to fix it.

see the benchmark results even a Nvidia RTX 3090 is slower than a AMD 7900xtx... so there is no excuse as a linux user to buy nvidia instead of AMD.

in most apps on amd hardware wayland is already faster and thats not even native wayland apps or games on native apps and games it will be even faster.

Plenty of reasons to use a Nvidia GPU on Linux compared to AMD. CUDA/OptiX are two reasons why many users would use Nvidia over AMD. Not to mention Wayland being broken for vision research which many use CUDA for.

Wish this review included a RTX 4090 or 4080

[MorrisS.]

games work under Wayland or XWayland in the comparison?

[MorrisS.]

Title says Wayland, then results are often quoted as (X)Wayland. Which one is it?

It completely changes the meaning of the results.

If it's XWayland, then the title should say that.

in my opinion the compared games are based on xorg

[jeisom]

A bunch of the nvidia side were about a 10% difference in favor of X11. I wonder if that is because of explicit sync in their X11 driver. If it were would that mean the amd side is giving up 10% by not using explicit sync yet?

[piotrj3]

Velocity, X’s entire operating model is a security nightmare, it functioning mostly relies on ignoring the vast majority of the X11 protocol, and it’s not designed or setup for modern hardware, nor to take advantage of that modern hardware. Fixing all of X’s issues would require breaking the X11 design hard enough that the developers made the well-informed decision to say “if we’re gonna break 85% of things, we may as well just break 100% of things and start from scratch.” Which is basically what Wayland became.

There’s multiple conference videos talking about the problems of X11 and how, even if you could get stuff working, you’re invariably working within a bad system and bandaiding a sinking ship.

Neither does Wayland takes advantage of modern hardware (good enough) because almost entire graphic stack is implicitly synced (like old directx/opengl). Modern stack like windows WDDM, Mantle, Vulkan, DX12, Metal is explicitly synced because you need that for multi-threading, parallel and dropping unnecessary synchronization fences when you make a lot of draws. Thing is, Apple (macs), Microsoft (since Vista), Google (android) were for long time preparing underlying technology in kernel and other low level stuff in explicit way.

Thing is for years GPUs are already designed in mind of that and there are hardware schedulers in them made in mind of that. Wayland (When technically it can run explicit way, but doesn't because most of linux stack isn't ready). So until we flip the switch to (almost) entirely move to explicit synchronization Wayland (at least comparing to graphics stacks of competition to linux) is nothing modern.

[MorrisS.]

If these titles were based on pure wayland, the results would be in favour of wayland since 2 times or 1/3 higher at least.

[piotrj3]

If these titles were based on pure wayland, the results would be in favour of wayland since 2 times or 1/3 more at least.

Such titles doesn't exist. Currently DXVK and Wine are made assumping Xorg or Xwayland is used. Few native ports have to account that clients only using X server exist so they also don't support Wayland. In close future it is not going to change anytime soon.

[andyprough]

but Redhat/IBM can not sell linux workstations to the government as long as this security hole is not fixed and wayland is the fix.

Redhat/IBM, Canonical, SuSE don't give a crap about selling workstations to governments - all they care about is selling the cloudy bits, that's where the money is. Governments are still running loads of stuff on old Windows 95 and Windows XP boxes and so forth - what is this nonsense about selling governments on security?

Wayland exists, just like so many projects in modern Linux, because devs get paid more money if they run around to conferences screaming about "security" all the time. Even if there's never been an exploit. The same reason all of our cpu's are mitigated against theoretical security threats that have never been exploited. Security Theater pays big bucks, keeps a lot of people employed.