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

First up was BioShock Infinite where using the X.Org sessions were a few frames faster than with Wayland on both KDE and GNOME. But overall the performance overhead of (X)Wayland these days for Linux gaming is much less than we have seen in the past. As far as the KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell performance for this aging but still popular OpenGL Linux game, it was basically the same for both the RX 580 and RX Vega 64 hardware.

The Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance panned out similarly with KDE and GNOME Shell largely running about the same speed when comparing the two on either Wayland or X.Org. For the X.Org vs. Wayland performance, using the Wayland-based sessions on Ubuntu 18.04 shaved off only a few frames.

Dota 2 with Vulkan on the latest Vega graphics card saw basically the same performance across the four desktop/display configurations while the RX 580 was still faster with X.Org, at least for the more CPU bound 1440p resolution.