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

With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.

This article is looking at the GNOME 43.1 desktop on Ubuntu 22.10 when running under the X.Org/X11-based session and then again with the Wayland session for both the NVIDIA R525 proprietary driver and the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver. On the AMD side was using Linux 6.2 Git with the Mesa 23.1-devel code from the Oibaf PPA while using the latest Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card for testing. On the NVIDIA side was their latest public driver build of v525.85.05 while using a GeForce RTX 3090 (still waiting on GeForce RTX 40 series hardware from NVIDIA...) and otherwise using the same system configuration besides the desktop session and driver changes.

With each GPU/driver and desktop session combination, a variety of games were tested on Linux -- both native Linux games as well as various Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play for seeing how the (X)Wayland performance compares to the traditional X.Org session on GNOME.