The reason that apps on Windows can bypass the compositor is that you can use them as the scanout buffer directly on fullscreen. On Linux (both Xorg and Wayland

The reason that apps on Windows can bypass the compositor is that you can use them as the scanout buffer directly on fullscreen. On Linux (both Xorg and Wayland), this same exact behavior is supported with a compositor. For strange legacy reasons, it's known as "fullscreen unredirection". If you're running windowed on all three OSes, you see the same compositor latency.