GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org Performance For Radeon & NVIDIA Gaming On Ubuntu 23.04

Similar to prior Wayland vs. X.Org desktop comparison impact on Linux gaming, here is a fresh round of tests looking at the (X)Wayland vs. X.Org GNOME session performance with Ubuntu 23.04 and the latest NVIDIA proprietary and AMD open-source graphics drivers on Linux.

This round of testing was done on Ubuntu 23.04 with the GNOME 44.1 desktop components. Tests were done on both AMD and NVIDIA under GNOME's X.Org session and then the Wayland Mutter compositor session for the (X)Wayland gaming performance for a mix of both native Linux games as well as Windows game titles running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam play.

On the AMD side was the Radeon RX 7900 XTX running the Linux 6.3.2 kernel and Mesa 23.2-devel for a fresh look at the open-source graphics driver performance. On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce RTX 4080 while using the 535.43.02 driver as the very latest release for the green team.

From there it was straight-forward looking at how the Wayland vs. X.Org GNOME session performance compares for Linux gamers on Ubuntu 23.04.