Ubuntu 20.04 Gaming Performance Across Desktops, X.Org vs. Wayland

Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.

Using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Linux 5.4 + Mesa 20.0.4, Steam Linux gaming benchmarks were done across all the prominent desktop options available and packaged for Ubuntu 20.04 in the Focal archive.

The tests for this article included:

- GNOME 3.36.1 on X.Org (the Ubuntu default)

- GNOME 3.36.1 on Wayland

- KDE Plasma 5.18.4 on X.Org

- KDE Plasma 5.18.4 on Wayland

- Xfce 4.14 on X.Org

- LXQt 0.14 on X.Org

- MATE 1.24 on X.Org

- Sway 1.4 on Wayland

- Budgie 10.5.1 desktop on X.Org

An AMD Radeon VII graphics card was used for this round of benchmarking across the different environments. The ACO back-end for RADV was also enabled throughout all of the testing.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux games were tested, both native and under Steam Play (Proton).