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

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 12 May 2018 at 02:00 PM EDT. Page 6 of 6. 53 Comments.
Ubuntu 18.04 - KDE GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org Radeon

When running the Xonotic open-source first person shooter game with low quality settings, the performance is CPU bound but showing basically no performance difference between desktops and display systems.

Ubuntu 18.04 - KDE GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org Radeon

With the X-Plane 11 flight simulator was a case where with Vega again we see KDE Wayland performing about the same speed -- if not a few frames faster -- than KDE on X.Org while the GNOME Wayland performance hit was similar on both graphics cards tested. The RX 580 on KDE Wayland also saw a similar performance penalty.

Ubuntu 18.04 - KDE GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org Radeon

Lastly was the DiRT Rally OpenGL racing game showing little performance hit to using (X)Wayland over X.Org Server 1.19 on Ubuntu 18.04 and basically the same performance between KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell as found on this Bionic Beaver Long Term Support release.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.