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

[caligula]

What's the point of Wayland? Like GNOME, it seems to be something that nobody truly wants or needs or likes, and which is even worse than its forerunner (X.Org / KDE) in many ways. But IBM keeps pushing with an iron will...

You seem to forget that with no new releases, Xorg will break at some point in the near future. You're dissing Wayland but not suggesting any concrete alternatives. Replacing a piece of turd with an unmaintained legacy piece of turd won't help anyone.

[Weasel]

Wayland is the perfect example of how you can't polish a turd if it's rotten at the roots and shit by design. So at least it's good historical example of what not to do.

It doesn't bring security, it brings paranoia. Security would mean all apps under same privilege/user (that can access each other's files) can spy on each other's windows, or even the desktop if it's a trusted user. That's functionality people need.

X11 has low security, Windows has proper security, and Wayland is a piece of paranoid junk that's akin to cutting off your internet connection for "security purposes".

[MrCooper]

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.

The nvidia driver currently doesn't do *any* synchronization with Xwayland, resulting in artifacts as described in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/.../-/issues/1317. Correct synchronization could only make it slower, regardless of the synchronization method.

If it were would that mean the amd side is giving up 10% by not using explicit sync yet?

Very unlikely.

radeonsi's performance compared to nvidia's (on Xorg) already seems consistent with how the HW compares in general, so it's unlikely that explicit sync (or any other single thing) could gain another 10%.

(I wouldn't expect explicit vs implicit sync to make any significant difference for performance)

[cjcox]

If Wayland performance is so bad, what is the reason for its existence?

Because nobody will support Xorg longer term. YMMV of course.

Also, Xorg and Wayland are very very different things. But regardless, the future has been determined. Wayland is where development will continue.

You may need a time machine in order to give your question more credence.

[andyprough]

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.

thats means the NSA is not a government organisation anymore ?... and be sure the NSA does not run windows 95 or windows XP

and of course these secret government contracts make explicit use of security clauses...

NSA will never buy enough workstations to justify IBM spending another 15 years getting all the kinks worked out of Wayland.

[qarium]

NSA will never buy enough workstations to justify IBM spending another 15 years getting all the kinks worked out of Wayland.

do you think the german BSI or BND or ZITiS or any other agency does buy something different ? they all buy from IBM/Redhat

[Berniyh]

NSA will never buy enough workstations to justify IBM spending another 15 years getting all the kinks worked out of Wayland.

Funny you say that. Because it took more than 20 years to get all the kinks worked out of X11. Actually I'd say it's still not done (and possibly never will), it's more like +36 years?

[WannaBeOCer]

I have my pick of GPU's whether it be NV or AMD. I won't touch NV on Linux or Windows for most the part - main reason? My pc becomes very sluggish with > 1 monitor if I'm doing heavy workloads. NV doesn't appear to multitask very well. EG I can game on Windows or Linux while rendering a video in Davinci (with SW encoding - HW encode quality sucks) and I will barely even notice the pc is busy. With an NV card just moving my mouse and switching between destkops / activities is sluggish when doing stuff in the background. Just dragging windows between two screens skips frames without load.

So I don't really care if NV is double the speed if it means I can't use my pc - nicely - while it chugs away. I tested this with NV 1050/60/2080/3080ti all vs AMD 5450/RX580/5700XT so it's not a "you need a more powerful gpu" argument it appears to be architecture. The 5450 gave a smoother experience than the 3080 in desktop use esp with multi mons. FWIW I sell way more NV's than AMD but sadly FPS sells cards not overall experience. Thats why I feel this Xorg vs Wayland benchmark is a bit pointless in the real world.

In the same way ppl keep talking about how Wayland is "smoother" that's the same experience I get with an AMD gpu. I couldn't care less if Xorg got 200fps and Wayland 100fps. It feels way better for gaming, though I do sign out of X11 after work and use Wayland for gaming as Wayland doesn't support all my apps. Where I do miss NV is for it's AI in Davinci.

Wayland is overall smoother than xorg even on Nvidia when moving around windows or launching apps. Not when playing games. If anything I’d seen more reports of Wayland stuttering in games than Xorg. I haven’t had any issues with Nvidia multi monitor setups on Windows or Linux.

I don’t use my GPU for video editing but training models, depending on how much VRAM I use the system could get sluggish. When I was using my Radeon VII I experienced the same behavior. This could also be a scheduler issue. On Windows enable Hardware Accelerated scheduling.

Nvidia’s NVENC has had better quality for quite some time. It wasn’t until mid last year AMD’s AMF encoder looked as decent.

[Berniyh]

Wayland is overall smoother than xorg even on Nvidia when moving around windows or launching apps. Not when playing games. If anything I’d seen more reports of Wayland stuttering in games than Xorg. I haven’t had any issues with Nvidia multi monitor setups on Windows or Linux.

Wayland compositors enforce vsync, which is a design decision and it's not always for the best. They're coming up with a protocol now that should tell the compositor to suspend vsync when a game is running, but afaik it's not implemented yet.
While vsync for typical desktop usage usually is appealing, when running games it can lead to lag and possibly stuttering. That is unless your display and GPU support freesync (properly) which solves the problem even without the new protocol.

[HellToupee]

I'm currently playing Transport Fever 2, which uses SDL2, on Wayland.

Another free game that uses SDL2 works on wayland native and can tax the GPU is Beyond all Reason an RTS bit like total annihilation.