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I habe been gaming on wayland for over a year and haven’t noticed any difference.
Maybe in super competitive games you may notice something but for the average gamer I think wayland has been viable for gaming for a rather long time.
It depends on your hardware. I notice it a lot on my Radeon 680M. I get bad input lag and inconsistent frame pacing. Performance matters when it comes to gaming and if Linux is to be taken seriously as a gaming platform these issues need to be addressed.
Yeah, was about to say: it's already suitable for me! Played a bunch of Steam games, as well as pirated games with Bottles.
In what situations is this a blocker for gaming? Like, genuinely, who actually had any significant issues from it? Top 1% Counter Strike pros? I've been playing games on Wayland for ages and I never understood how anyone can think the experience is worse, let alone so bad it's unusable.
I play a lot of FPS and third-person games so input latency is incredibly important to me. Honestly, once you try gaming in a truly low-latency environment (VRR, high refresh rate), it's hard to go back. Every time I try gaming in KDE Wayland on Radeon 680M, I notice mouse input lag and bad frame pacing.
The only Wayland compositor that I know of that doesn't exhibit these issues is the one used on the Steam Deck, but I am guessing there's some special sauce there.
It's not a huge amount of latency, so it's probably not super noticible to people who don't pay much attention. I'm pretty sensitive to input lag, and it does feel noticeably worse than both X11 without compositing and windows.
It is possible to get decent latency currently, with VRR + mailbox + fps cap, but there is still no VRR support if you use gnome.
I had an issue with it on nvidia. no matter what I did I couldnt get fps above my screens refresh rate despite vsync being off in game, it was being forced by xwayland. I dont have the same issue with my AMD card though.
It really depends on the hardware. With 144Hz vsync isn't much of an issue for me, but 60Hz is noticeably worse with vsync on.
Most likely FPS games but probably any kind of game where you need a fast response time. I understand that some people don't notice input lag with vsync on, but for me it's unusable. I'm not even close to the "Top 1% Counter Strike pros" but when I'm playing Portal 2, CrossCode, Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, CS Go, Path of Exile, etc, it bothers me A LOT.
As someone who games exclusively (okay, except fucking PUBG) on Linux and Wayland for two years now, I find the implicit claim that (x)Wayland would not be suitable for Linux pretty misleading. The problem is that this is repeated a lot throughout the community, mainly by people who haven't tried it recently. However, good for the few people that need that feature!
I feel like you're just doing the same thing but from the other side. You're dismissing other people's experiences with Wayland simply because it doesn't line up with what you're personally seeing on your specific hardware.
On my Radeon 680M, Wayland has been an absolute no-go for gaming in terms of input latency and frame pacing. I tried it with Valheim and God of War in KDE Wayland and the performance is drastically worse than KDE X11. Other games like Spiderman Miles Morales show less of a performance gap, but it's still there. And yes I tried it very recently.
That's not my intention at all, in fact, I really welcome such contributions with precise examples, so thank you for providing one! Hardware is a good point, my GPU is a 6800XT which I bought right at release. Played all kinds of games but actually none if the ones you listed. Some working examples on my system:
All of this on Arch Linux with a 5900X CPU. Hope the combination of our comments gives OP a picture :)
Haha, sorry if I came out a bit strong in my previous comment. I daily drive Linux on all the machines I game on and I do want to see Wayland succeed, especially in the gaming space. This is why I find the merge request I linked to in the main post (I am OP btw) so exciting! And we do already see Wayland working really well on the Steam Deck due to Valve putting in some extra magic sauce (like the aforementioned tearing support), so I have no doubt that Wayland will get there on desktop eventually.
my GPU is a 6800XT
This makes me wonder whether the input latency issues are more noticeable on lower-end cards running at lower framerates. It makes sense that that could be the case. A 6800XT might be brute forcing through some of the inefficiencies that would otherwise be visible on a dinky little APU like my Radeon 680M. You also have a pretty beefy CPU, so I am also wondering whether that has an effect on how certain Wayland compositors deliver frames. For example, in Valheim, it isn't just simple input latency issues, the frame delivery is actually worse somehow.
Did you do performance comparisons between Wayland and X11, or is your metric subjective?
Completely subjective, I represent the average semi-casual gamer that is limited by skill, not lag. So for all these games I can just tell I did not notice any lag that annoyed me (and everything ran on my 144Hz monitor) and that there have been no framerate drops (to that, I am susceptible)
What year is it!?
The year of waylan
That's amazing!!! Great news! Now just need the option to disable viewport suspension, I'd be on it 100% of the time
What's viewport suspension?
I'm not sure if it has a different name, and I apologize if I'm saying things you already know. Viewport is basically just what's visible on your screen.
Wayland, for optimization and security, suspends apps not visible on your screen. Normally, this is a really great feature, but it becomes problematic for me.
For instance, I'm playing an mmo, I keep a browser open on another virtual desktop so I can find things I need and the game doesn't alt-tab very well. While I'm on the second virtual desktop, it suspends my game, the mmo assumes I've disconnected, and logs me out. This is becoming more of an issue with most games now being live service, so I can't just queue for a game in Overwatch, then go browse on the other vdesktop.
Let's say you don't use virtual desktops. I play music from my computer while I'm cleaning the house. Screen locks, music stops. I know, I can use caffeine to keep it from sleeping, but I shouldn't have to, and what if I want to leave the room and not have to worry about what kind of damage a family member can do without having to know my login?
It's technically a good feature, and I would absolutely keep it on if it were on my work computer, but it just doesn't fit for my personal rig. It's not an optional function since it's considered a big win for security, but I'd love the option to toggle it off so I can keep using my computer the way that I want to. It may sound silly, but it drove me back to xorg, despite me otherwise loving Wayland.
Oh man, I can see how that gets annoying. I didn't even know that was a thing in Wayland. Thanks for the explanation :)
Of course! Thanks for coming to my TED talk :P
I really hope they can add that option, but I get the feeling it's looooow on their priority list since it's perceived as a feature. But here's hoping :)
I think it should be able to be toggled on a per app basis, along with a global keyboard like X has (so I could (un)mute discord or whatever without alt tabbing over). Maybe similar to how Android does things where it asks the user for permission to do something, you could make the app request for permission and maybe some helper app that forces permissions for other apps.
I can get behind that, that'd work great for me. / I saw some app that allows certain apps force preventing suspensions, but that feels like a hacky solution, and I'd still rather be able to lock the screen, so a sort of trust or exemption to the viewport rule would be great