GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Performance + Power Usage On Fedora 32 With AMD Renoir Laptop

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32.

Here are a collection of metrics when testing the GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org performance and related power / usage statistics on Fedora Workstation 32 running off the Lenovo laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U.

On some systems we have found recent Firefox releases to perform better on Wayland, but in this case the results didn't yield any meaningful change:





The memory usage during these Firefox browser tests did appear to be running lower with the X.Org session:





The battery power consumption was unchanged between the sessions:





Meanwhile with the open-source Tesseract OpenGL game:

That Linux-native OpenGL game performed similarly between Wayland and X.Org.

Memory usage was slightly better still with X.Org.

There wasn't a meaningful difference for the power consumption.



The Xonotic results were similar. Then other benchmarks were run like DarkTable, GIMP, and RawTherapee while continuing to monitor the memory usage, battery power draw, and performance. The performance in those other workloads was obviously unchanged but it was the overall RAM usage and power consumption we were most curious about:

Over the course of all the benchmarks ran, using the GNOME Wayland session led to ~200MB higher RAM usage compared to the X.Org session.

The battery power usage on this Ryzen 5 4500U laptop was basically the same: well, 0.3 Watts in favor of X.Org.

The system thermal performance obviously had no meaningful difference between the X.Org and Wayland sessions.

Hope those data points were interesting for those curious about the latest on Wayland vs. X.Org for laptops running an up-to-date Linux software stack... More AMD Renoir Linux mobile tests forthcoming.