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

With the open-source DDraceNetwork platformer game there was a significant reduction in performance on the NVIDIA side when using GNOME's Wayland compositor.

Quake 2 RTX in stressing the Vulkan ray-tracing support saw Wayland preferred by Radeon and NVIDIA preferring the X.Org session.

The Tesseract, Xonotic, and Unvanquished open-source games also showed significant performance penalties on the NVIDIA side when running under the Mutter Wayland compositor.

The (X)Wayland gaming performance overall remains in great shape for the open-source Radeon (and Intel) graphics driver stack but when it comes to the performance when using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver as of the R525 series it still clearly prefers the traditional X.Org based session. Across the span of different games tested, when switching from the GNOME X.Org session over to Mutter with Wayland meant around a 16% hit to the frame-rate. NVIDIA continues though working to improve their Wayland support so it will be interesting to see how this performance disparity changes over the course of 2023. Of the games tested, on the Radeon side the only major Wayland issue encountered was the very poor performance of DiRT Rally 2.0 on Steam Play under the GNOME Wayland session.